>Maybe for the sake of experimentation, take one of the tasks where CoT performs considerably better than the direct prompt?

That sounds a good idea, though NLP isn't really my field, so I might also not be using the correct sampling parameters/make subtle mistakes in writing the question (e.g. punctuation, line breaks, etc.), so I was hoping someone here would know more.

Even for English to German translation, the model often generated obvious nonsense, sometimes even just repeating the english phrase, despite using the prompt as it is in the hugging face config/paper.