Tree-of-Thought (ToT), proposed by Yao et al. at Princeton in 2023, takes Chain-of-Thought one step further. Instead of producing a single chain of reasoning, it explores multiple candidate thoughts in parallel, scores branches and can backtrack to try different paths — think of it as marrying classical tree search (BFS/DFS) with an LLM. The approach can outperform CoT on complex planning, game playing and multi-step problem solving, but each branch costs additional compute, making it expensive. Modern Reasoning models rarely invoke ToT as an explicit framework, but their internal large-scale deliberation strategies clearly draw on the same underlying idea.
MEVZU N°124ISTANBULYEAR I — VOL. III
Glossary · Advanced · 2023
Tree-of-Thought (ToT)
A reasoning approach that explores multiple branches in parallel instead of a single chain, then picks the best path.
- EN — English term
- Tree-of-Thought (ToT)
- TR — Turkish term
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