Chain-of-Table: make the table itself the chain of thought — one op at a time, eight rows collapse to a single cell

1Key Takeaways

• Ask a language model a question about a table — "which North-region rep brought in the most revenue?" — and plain chain-of-thought answers it by reasoning over the rows in prose , holding every filtered row, every product and every running sum in its head at once.
• On more than a handful of rows that hidden scratchpad drops a row, mis-multiplies, or forgets a match, and the mistake is invisible in the final sentence.
• Chain-of-Table (Wang et al., 2024) fixes this by making the table itself the….