Chain-of-thought reasoning, a cognitive process fundamental to human intelligence, has garnered significant attention in the realm of artificial intelligence and natural language processing. However, there still remains a lack of a comprehensive survey for this arena. To this end, we take the first step and present a thorough survey of this research field carefully and widely. We use X-of-Thought to refer to Chain-of-Thought in a broad sense. In detail, we systematically organize the current research according to the taxonomies of methods, including XoT construction, XoT structure variants, and enhanced XoT. Additionally, we describe XoT with frontier applications, covering planning, tool use, and distillation. Furthermore, we address challenges and discuss some future directions, including faithfulness, multi-modal, and theory. We hope this survey serves as a valuable resource for researchers seeking to innovate within the domain of chain-of-thought reasoning.

翻译：思维链推理作为一种人类智能基础的认知过程，已在人工智能和自然语言处理领域引起广泛关注。然而，该领域仍缺乏全面的综述研究。为此，我们率先展开工作，对研究领域进行了广泛且细致的全面综述。我们用"X-of-Thought"广义指代思维链推理。具体而言，我们按方法分类体系系统梳理了现有研究，包括XoT构建、XoT结构变体及增强型XoT。此外，我们结合前沿应用描述了XoT，涵盖规划、工具使用和知识蒸馏。最后，我们探讨了挑战与未来方向，包括忠实性、多模态和理论建设。期望本综述能为思维链推理领域的创新研究者提供宝贵资源。