Mingyan Li
2025
Beyond Chain-of-Thought: A Survey of Chain-of-X Paradigms for LLMs
Yu Xia
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Rui Wang
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Xu Liu
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Mingyan Li
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Tong Yu
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Xiang Chen
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Julian McAuley
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Shuai Li
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has been a widely adopted prompting method, eliciting impressive reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Inspired by the sequential thought structure of CoT, a number of Chain-of-X (CoX) methods have been developed to address challenges across diverse domains and tasks. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of Chain-of-X methods for LLMs in different contexts. Specifically, we categorize them by taxonomies of nodes, i.e., the X in CoX, and application tasks. We also discuss the findings and implications of existing CoX methods, as well as potential future directions. Our survey aims to serve as a detailed and up-to-date resource for researchers seeking to apply the idea of CoT to broader scenarios.