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Tree-of-Thought(ToT)
Explores multiple reasoning paths through branching and backtracking
In 30 seconds
- What
- Explores multiple reasoning branches in parallel, evaluates each path, backtracks to promising nodes, and selects the best solution.
- When to use
- Complex decisions with multiple valid approaches, strategic planning requiring trade-off analysis, or problems where early choices constrain later options.
- Watch out
- Exponential token cost and latency grow quickly; most branches waste compute on paths that won't be selected.
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Tree-of-Thought: Overview
Explores multiple reasoning paths through branching and backtracking
- Tree structure for exploring alternatives
- Supports backtracking and revision
- Evaluates multiple solution paths
- Ideal for strategic planning and complex decisions
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References
The papers, specifications, and repositories this pattern is based on.
- Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models (Yao et al., 2023)arXiv:2305.10601
- Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models (Wei et al., 2022)arXiv:2201.11903
- When Tree of Thoughts Succeeds: Larger Models Excel in Generation (Chen et al., 2024)arXiv:2410.17820
- Large Language Model Guided Tree-of-Thought (Hulbert, 2023)arXiv:2305.08291
- Hugging Face: Understanding and Implementing Tree of Thoughts
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