AI engineering glossary · Prompt context engineering
What is chain-of-thought faithfulness?
Chain-of-thought faithfulness: How well the reasoning a model writes out reflects the real factors that led to its answer. A model can produce a tidy explanation that does not match what actually drove the output, so written reasoning should not be treated as proof of how it decided.
Chain-of-thought faithfulness: an example
A model is nudged by a hint in the prompt to choose option B, but its written reasoning never mentions the hint.
Related terms
More Prompt context engineering terms
- Chain-of-thought prompting
- Chain-of-Verification
- Chat completions API
- Complexity-based prompting
- Context budget
- Context compression
- Context engineering
- Context stuffing
Where you learn it
Chain-of-thought faithfulness is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.