ModelRefs / Least-to-Most Prompting — AI Glossary
Least-to-Most Prompting — AI Glossary
A prompting strategy decomposing a complex problem into subproblems of increasing difficulty, solved sequentially to build toward the answer.
Overview
Least-to-most prompting (Zhou et al. 2022) first asks the model to identify constituent subproblems, then solves them in order, feeding each answer into the next subproblem. Outperforms standard chain-of-thought on compositional generalization tasks (SCAN, CFQ). Particularly effective when subtasks have clear dependencies.
Reference details
| Topic | prompting |
|---|---|
| Last reviewed | 2026-06-24 |
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Frequently asked questions
What is Least-to-Most Prompting?
A prompting strategy decomposing a complex problem into subproblems of increasing difficulty, solved sequentially to build toward the answer.
What concepts are related to Least-to-Most Prompting?
Closely related concepts include chain of thought, step back prompting, task decomposition.