{
  "id": "step-back-prompting",
  "code": "PTL-0032",
  "term": "Step-Back Prompting",
  "aliases": [
    "abstraction prompting"
  ],
  "category": "reasoning",
  "definition": "Step-back prompting has the model first answer a more general, abstract question about the underlying principle, then use that answer to reason about the original specific question.",
  "description": "For a physics question, the step-back question might ask which law applies. Zheng et al. reported gains on science, multi-hop, and knowledge-intensive question answering.",
  "example": null,
  "broader": [],
  "narrower": [],
  "related": [
    "chain-of-thought",
    "generated-knowledge-prompting"
  ],
  "introduced": 2023,
  "sources": [
    {
      "title": "Take a Step Back: Evoking Reasoning via Abstraction in Large Language Models",
      "authors": "Zheng et al.",
      "year": 2023,
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.06117"
    }
  ],
  "url": "https://protologue.com/t/step-back-prompting/",
  "citation": "Protologue. (2026). Step-Back Prompting. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.0.0, PTL-0032). https://protologue.com/t/step-back-prompting/"
}