Pith. sign in

REVIEW 6 cited by

HoT: Highlighted Chain of Thought for Referencing Supporting Facts from Inputs

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2503.02003 v6 pith:XLC47NS4 submitted 2025-03-03 cs.CL cs.HC

HoT: Highlighted Chain of Thought for Referencing Supporting Facts from Inputs

classification cs.CL cs.HC
keywords llmsfactspromptingquestionwhenaccuratelychaincorrect
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
read the original abstract

An Achilles heel of Large Language Models (LLMs) is their tendency to hallucinate non-factual statements. A response mixed of factual and non-factual statements poses a challenge for humans to verify and accurately base their decisions on. To combat this problem, we propose Highlighted Chain-of-Thought Prompting (HoT), a technique for prompting LLMs to generate responses with XML tags that ground facts to those provided in the question. That is, given an input question, LLMs would first re-format the question to add XML tags highlighting key facts, and then, generate a response with highlights over the facts referenced from the input. Compared to vanilla chain of thought prompting (CoT), HoT reduces the rate of hallucination and separately improves LLM accuracy consistently on over 22 tasks from arithmetic, reading comprehension, to logical reasoning. When asking humans to verify LLM responses, highlights help time-limited participants to more accurately and efficiently recognize when LLMs are correct. Yet, surprisingly, when LLMs are wrong, HoTs tend to fool users into believing that an answer is correct.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. SketchVLM: Vision language models can annotate images to explain thoughts and guide users

    cs.CV 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    SketchVLM lets VLMs generate non-destructive SVG annotations on input images to visually explain answers, raising visual reasoning accuracy by up to 28.5 points and annotation quality by 1.48x over baselines.

  2. What LLMs explain is not what they believe: Evaluating explanation sufficiency under models' own input beliefs

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Proposes SCSuff metric for evaluating LLM explanation sufficiency via model-generated alternative inputs, showing explanations are typically insufficient and predictable from hidden states.

  3. PageGuide: Browser extension to assist users in navigating a webpage and locating information

    cs.HC 2026-04 accept novelty 6.0

    PageGuide grounds LLM answers in webpage DOM elements using visual overlays for find, guide, and hide modes, yielding measurable gains in a 94-user study.

  4. PageGuide: Browser extension to assist users in navigating a webpage and locating information

    cs.HC 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    PageGuide is a browser extension that grounds LLM responses in webpage DOM elements via visual overlays for Find, Guide, and Hide modes, reporting performance gains over unaided browsing in a 94-user study.

  5. TDA-RC: Task-Driven Alignment for Knowledge-Based Reasoning Chains in Large Language Models

    cs.CL 2026-03 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    TDA-RC embeds topological patterns from multi-round reasoning into CoT via persistent homology and a repair agent, yielding better accuracy-efficiency trade-offs than ToT or GoT on tested datasets.

  6. The Periodic Table of LLM Reasoning: A Structured Survey of Reasoning Paradigms, Methods, and Failure Modes

    cs.CL 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    A literature survey that introduces a taxonomy for LLM reasoning paradigms, analyzes methodological trends, and synthesizes failure modes from over 300 papers.