scratchpad
A scratchpad is a working space where an AI model or agent records intermediate computations, plans and notes before producing a final result.
A scratchpad originally means a pad for jotting down quick calculations or thoughts. In AI, it refers to a space where a language model writes intermediate calculations or reasoning steps before giving its final answer. In 2021, Google researchers published work showing that having language models write intermediate computations to a scratchpad first improved performance on multi-step computation tasks.
For AI agents, the term also describes a working-memory space, often a file or separate memory store, where plans, decisions and progress are kept over a multi-step task. It is close to chain-of-thought prompting, which asks a model to lay out its reasoning in sequence, but the emphasis is on a separate place where that record is kept.
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Articles covering this entry
Chain-of-thought, a technique in which a model writes out intermediate steps before answering, works like a scratchpad.
The agents could also keep notes in a scratchpad file and check current human records.
Chat works well as a scratchpad.