ACIL: Auto Chain of Thoughts for In-Context Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Chu, Rui
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Chu, Rui
author_facet Chu, Rui
contents Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown that Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning can substantially improve performance on complex reasoning tasks. At the same time, In-Context Learning (ICL) has become an important mechanism for adapting LLMs to new tasks without updating model parameters, using only examples provided in the prompt. However, standard ICL often struggles on tasks that require multi-step reasoning, because the demonstrations usually contain only input-output pairs and lack explicit intermediate reasoning steps. This paper introduces an Automatic Chain-of-Thought (Auto-CoT) framework to improve ICL by automatically constructing reasoning-enhanced demonstrations. Auto-CoT generates reasoning chains for input-output examples, augments the prompt context with structured intermediate explanations, and removes irrelevant or low-quality demonstrations through a systematic selection process. By incorporating high-quality reasoning examples into the ICL prompt, Auto-CoT guides the model toward more reliable reasoning and improves prediction accuracy. Experiments across multiple reasoning tasks demonstrate that the proposed framework improves ICL performance by providing explicit intermediate reasoning guidance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_17088
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ACIL: Auto Chain of Thoughts for In-Context Learning
Chu, Rui
Computation and Language
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown that Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning can substantially improve performance on complex reasoning tasks. At the same time, In-Context Learning (ICL) has become an important mechanism for adapting LLMs to new tasks without updating model parameters, using only examples provided in the prompt. However, standard ICL often struggles on tasks that require multi-step reasoning, because the demonstrations usually contain only input-output pairs and lack explicit intermediate reasoning steps. This paper introduces an Automatic Chain-of-Thought (Auto-CoT) framework to improve ICL by automatically constructing reasoning-enhanced demonstrations. Auto-CoT generates reasoning chains for input-output examples, augments the prompt context with structured intermediate explanations, and removes irrelevant or low-quality demonstrations through a systematic selection process. By incorporating high-quality reasoning examples into the ICL prompt, Auto-CoT guides the model toward more reliable reasoning and improves prediction accuracy. Experiments across multiple reasoning tasks demonstrate that the proposed framework improves ICL performance by providing explicit intermediate reasoning guidance.
title ACIL: Auto Chain of Thoughts for In-Context Learning
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.17088