Chain-of-Draft: keep the reasoning, drop the narration, and cut ~80% of your reasoning tokens

1Key Takeaways

• Chain-of-Thought reliably lifts reasoning accuracy by making a model write its intermediate steps down instead of leaping to an answer.
• But look at a CoT trace closely and you'll notice something: on a simple arithmetic problem the model emits a paragraph where the actual work is one subtraction.
• Chain-of-Draft (Xu et al., 2025, Zoom) is the fix — same step-by-step reasoning, but each step is capped to a terse draft of a few words.
• The paper reports roughly 80% fewer reasoning tokens at….