Hitchhiker's Guide From CoT to Agents
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A survey mapping the conceptual evolution from chain-of-thought reasoning to modern language-agent frameworks.
CoT foundations: Covers the mechanics underpinning CoT (few-shot prompting, self-consistency, least-to-most, tree-of-thought) with a consistent formalism.
Mechanism theory: Explores why CoT works - in-context learning, prompt engineering theories, and emergence at scale - rather than just cataloging results.
CoT-to-agent bridge: Traces how CoT techniques were progressively extended into tool use, multi-step planning, and full agent loops (ReAct, Reflexion, etc.).
Framework landscape: Organizes the modern language-agent frameworks by which parts of the CoT-to-agent pipeline they emphasize, clarifying an otherwise noisy field.
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