More on Prompting Techniques

Prompt Engineering

Mick McQuaid
mcq@utexas.edu

University of Texas at Austin

28 Sep 2025

Week Six

Agenda

  • Guest from Google: Jasleen Singh
  • Presentations: Abhiram, Ethan
  • News
  • Review whatialreadyknow (Dhruvi)
  • eB review
  • m1 review
  • Agenta.ai
  • Techniques
  • Work time

Presentations

News

The Batch

⟨\langle pause to look at this week’s edition ⟩\rangle

WhatIKnow (Dhruvi)

⟨\langle look at the doc ⟩\rangle

eB review

m1 review

Agenta.ai

⟨\langle watch the video ⟩\rangle

More on Techniques

Last time, we did few-shot and zero-shot prompting techniques. Now we’ll move on to thought generation techniques and others. Again, we’re referring to Schulhoff et al. (2024).

Thought Generation

  • prompting the model to articulate its ongoing reasoning
  • Chain-of-Thought
  • Zero-Shot Chain-of-Thought
  • Step-Back Prompting
  • Analogical Prompting
  • Thread-of-Thought Prompting
  • Tabular Chain-of-Thought

Few-Shot CoT

  • multiple examples, including chains-of-thought
  • Contrastive CoT Prompting
  • Uncertainty-Routed CoT Prompting
  • Complexity-based Prompting
  • Active Prompting
  • Memory-of-Thought Prompting
  • Automatic Chain-of-Thought Prompting

Decomposition

  • explicitly decomposing the problem into subproblems
  • Least-to-Most Prompting
  • Plan-and-Solve Prompting
  • Tree-of-Thought Prompting
  • Recursion-of-Thought Prompting
  • Program-of-Thoughts
  • Faithful Chain-of-Thought
  • Skeleton-of-Thought
  • Metacognitive Prompting

Ensembling

  • using multiple prompts to solve the same problem, then aggregating the results, for example, by majority vote
  • Demonstration Ensembling
  • Mixture of Reasoning Experts
  • Max Mutual Information Method
  • Self-Consistency
  • Universal Self-Consistency
  • Meta-Reasoning over Multiple CoTs
  • DiVeRSe
  • Consistency-based Self-Adaptive Prompting
  • Universal Self-Adaptive Prompting
  • Prompt Paraphrasing

Self-Criticism

  • prompting the model to critique its own output
  • Self-Calibration
  • Self-Refine
  • Reversing Chain-of-Thought
  • Self-Verification
  • Chain-of-Verification
  • Cumulative Reasoning

END

References

Schulhoff, Sander, Michael Ilie, Nishant Balepur, Konstantine Kahadze, Amanda Liu, Chenglei Si, Yinheng Li, et al. 2024. “The Prompt Report: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Techniques.” https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.06608.

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