# HoT: Highlighted Chain of Thought for Referencing Supporting Facts from Inputs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.02003 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02003/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 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 51 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Mar 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Prompting and chain-of-thought reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/prompting-and-chain-of-thought-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10601/) (2023)
- [GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12022/) (2023)
- [Self-RAG: Learning to Retrieve, Generate, and Critique through Self-Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11511/) (2023)
- [Challenging BIG-Bench Tasks and Whether Chain-of-Thought Can Solve Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09261/) (2022)
- [Least-to-Most Prompting Enables Complex Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10625/) (2022)
- [DROP: A Reading Comprehension Benchmark Requiring Discrete Reasoning Over Paragraphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00161/) (2019)
- [Are NLP Models really able to Solve Simple Math Word Problems?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07191/) (2021)
- [Vision Transformers Need Registers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16588/) (2023)
- [SelfCheckGPT: Zero-Resource Black-Box Hallucination Detection for Generative Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08896/) (2023)
- [Galactica: A Large Language Model for Science](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09085/) (2022)
- [Did Aristotle Use a Laptop? A Question Answering Benchmark with Implicit Reasoning Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02235/) (2021)
- [Siren's Song in the AI Ocean: A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01219/) (2023)
- [Program Induction by Rationale Generation : Learning to Solve and Explain Algebraic Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.04146/) (2017)
- [Enabling Large Language Models to Generate Text with Citations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14627/) (2023)
- [GSM-Symbolic: Understanding the Limitations of Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05229/) (2024)
- [A Dataset of Information-Seeking Questions and Answers Anchored in Research Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03011/) (2021)
- [Complexity-Based Prompting for Multi-Step Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00720/) (2022)
- [Solving General Arithmetic Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.01413/) (2016)
- [Chain-of-Verification Reduces Hallucination in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11495/) (2023)
- [A Diverse Corpus for Evaluating and Developing English Math Word Problem Solvers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15772/) (2021)
- [Understanding Neural Networks through Representation Erasure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08220/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Improving Human Verification of LLM Reasoning through Interactive Explanation Interfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22922/) (2025)
- [FraudShield: Knowledge Graph Empowered Defense for LLMs against Fraud Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22485/) (2026)
- [TDA-RC: Task-Driven Alignment for Knowledge-Based Reasoning Chains in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04942/) (2026)
- [Generating Privacy Stories From Software Documentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23014/) (2025)
- [ReFIne: A Framework for Trustworthy Large Reasoning Models with Reliability, Faithfulness, and Interpretability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09062/) (2025)
- [Automatic Prompt Generation via Adaptive Selection of Prompting Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18162/) (2025)
- [SketchVLM: Vision language models can annotate images to explain thoughts and guide users](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22875/) (2026)
- [The Periodic Table of LLM Reasoning: A Structured Survey of Reasoning Paradigms, Methods, and Failure Modes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.11470/) (2026)
- [Signals of AI Hallucination: Designing Hallucination-Aware Cues for Embodied Conversational Agents in VR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.28812/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

An Achilles heel of Large Language Models (LLMs) is their tendency to hallucinate non-factual statements. A response mixed of factual and non-factual statements poses a challenge for humans to verify and accurately base their decisions on. To combat this problem, we propose Highlighted Chain-of-Thought Prompting (HoT), a technique for prompting LLMs to generate responses with XML tags that ground facts to those provided in the question. That is, given an input question, LLMs would first re-format the question to add XML tags highlighting key facts, and then, generate a response with highlights over the facts referenced from the input. Compared to vanilla chain of thought prompting (CoT), HoT reduces the rate of hallucination and separately improves LLM accuracy consistently on over 22 tasks from arithmetic, reading comprehension, to logical reasoning. When asking humans to verify LLM responses, highlights help time-limited participants to more accurately and efficiently recognize when LLMs are correct. Yet, surprisingly, when LLMs are wrong, HoTs tend to fool users into believing that an answer is correct.