# Enhancing Chain-of-Thoughts Prompting with Iterative Bootstrapping in Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.11657 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11657/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Prompting and chain-of-thought reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 35 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Apr 2023.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Prompting and chain-of-thought reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/prompting-and-chain-of-thought-reasoning/)
- Synthetic data and self-improvement for LLMs / [Synthetic reasoning data and bootstrapping](https://mlsanity.com/synth/synthetic-reasoning-data-and-bootstrapping/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05100/) (2022)
- [CommonsenseQA: A Question Answering Challenge Targeting Commonsense Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00937/) (2018)
- [Least-to-Most Prompting Enables Complex Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10625/) (2022)
- [Calibrate Before Use: Improving Few-Shot Performance of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09690/) (2021)
- [LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08239/) (2022)
- [Scaling Language Models: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Training Gopher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11446/) (2021)
- [Measuring and Narrowing the Compositionality Gap in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03350/) (2022)
- [STaR: Bootstrapping Reasoning With Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14465/) (2022)
- [Are NLP Models really able to Solve Simple Math Word Problems?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07191/) (2021)
- [Did Aristotle Use a Laptop? A Question Answering Benchmark with Implicit Reasoning Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02235/) (2021)
- [Automatic Chain of Thought Prompting in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03493/) (2022)
- [MathQA: Towards Interpretable Math Word Problem Solving with Operation-Based Formalisms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13319/) (2019)
- [Program Induction by Rationale Generation : Learning to Solve and Explain Algebraic Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.04146/) (2017)
- [Using DeepSpeed and Megatron to Train Megatron-Turing NLG 530B, A Large-Scale Generative Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11990/) (2022)
- [Complexity-Based Prompting for Multi-Step Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00720/) (2022)
- [A Diverse Corpus for Evaluating and Developing English Math Word Problem Solvers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15772/) (2021)
- [ART: Automatic multi-step reasoning and tool-use for large language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09014/) (2023)
- [Active Prompting with Chain-of-Thought for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12246/) (2023)
- [Automatic Prompt Augmentation and Selection with Chain-of-Thought from Labeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12822/) (2023)
- [Synthetic Prompting: Generating Chain-of-Thought Demonstrations for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00618/) (2023)
- [Poolingformer: Long Document Modeling with Pooling Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04371/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Personal LLM Agents: Insights and Survey about the Capability, Efficiency and Security](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05459/) (2024)
- [Think-on-Graph: Deep and Responsible Reasoning of Large Language Model on Knowledge Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07697/) (2023)
- [Unlocking the Capabilities of Thought: A Reasoning Boundary Framework to Quantify and Optimize Chain-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05695/) (2024)
- [How Far Can Transformers Reason? The Globality Barrier and Inductive Scratchpad](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06467/) (2024)
- [Pushing the Limits of ChatGPT on NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09719/) (2023)
- [Improving Physics Reasoning in Large Language Models Using Mixture of Refinement Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00821/) (2024)
- [Mitigating Misleading Chain-of-Thought Reasoning with Selective Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19167/) (2024)
- [Embodied CoT Distillation From LLM To Off-the-shelf Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11499/) (2024)
- [Self-Convinced Prompting: Few-Shot Question Answering with Repeated Introspection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05035/) (2023)
- [DCR: Divide-and-Conquer Reasoning for Multi-choice Question Answering with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05190/) (2024)
- [Multi-Turn Human-LLM Interaction Through the Lens of a Two-Way Intelligibility Protocol](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20600/) (2024)
- [CountLoop: Training-Free High-Instance Image Generation via Iterative Agent Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.16644/) (2025)
- [FairCoT: Enhancing Fairness in Text-to-Image Generation via Chain of Thought Reasoning with Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09070/) (2024)
- [Program of Thoughts for Financial Reasoning: Leveraging Dynamic In-Context Examples and Generative Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13157/) (2025)
- [Prompt Engineering for Scale Development in Generative Psychometrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15909/) (2026)
- [StraTune: Adaptive Selection of Revision Operators for Self-Evolving LLM Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32886/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) can achieve highly effective performance on various reasoning tasks by incorporating step-by-step chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting as demonstrations. However, the reasoning chains of demonstrations generated by LLMs are prone to errors, which can subsequently lead to incorrect reasoning during inference. Furthermore, inappropriate exemplars (overly simplistic or complex), can affect overall performance among varying levels of difficulty. We introduce Iter-CoT (Iterative bootstrapping in Chain-of-Thoughts Prompting), an iterative bootstrapping approach for selecting exemplars and generating reasoning chains. By utilizing iterative bootstrapping, our approach enables LLMs to autonomously rectify errors, resulting in more precise and comprehensive reasoning chains. Simultaneously, our approach selects challenging yet answerable questions accompanied by reasoning chains as exemplars with a moderate level of difficulty, which enhances the LLMs' generalizability across varying levels of difficulty. Experimental results indicate that Iter-CoT exhibits superiority, achieving competitive performance across three distinct reasoning tasks on ten datasets.