# Autonomous Tree-search Ability of Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.10686 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10686/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Test-time compute and efficient thinking, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 24 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Oct 2023.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Test-time compute and efficient thinking](https://mlsanity.com/lr/test-time-compute-and-efficient-thinking/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03874/) (2021)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10601/) (2023)
- [CommonsenseQA: A Question Answering Challenge Targeting Commonsense Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00937/) (2018)
- [Show Your Work: Scratchpads for Intermediate Computation with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00114/) (2021)
- [Graph of Thoughts: Solving Elaborate Problems with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09687/) (2023)
- [FrugalGPT: How to Use Large Language Models While Reducing Cost and Improving Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05176/) (2023)
- [Explain Yourself! Leveraging Language Models for Commonsense Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02361/) (2019)
- [Sustainable AI: Environmental Implications, Challenges and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00364/) (2021)
- [Large Language Model Guided Tree-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08291/) (2023)
- [Evaluating the Logical Reasoning Ability of ChatGPT and GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03439/) (2023)
- [Teaching Algorithmic Reasoning via In-context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09066/) (2022)
- [A Neural Network Solves, Explains, and Generates University Math Problems by Program Synthesis and Few-Shot Learning at Human Level](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.15594/) (2021)
- [Cumulative Reasoning with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04371/) (2023)
- [Algorithm of Thoughts: Enhancing Exploration of Ideas in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10379/) (2023)
- [GPT is becoming a Turing machine: Here are some ways to program it](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14310/) (2023)
- [Rational Decision-Making Agent with Internalized Utility Judgment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12519/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [ToTRL: Unlock LLM Tree-of-Thoughts Reasoning Potential through Puzzles Solving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12717/) (2025)
- [When LLM Meets Tree Search: A Systematic View of Inference as Search in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.30395/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models have excelled in remarkable reasoning capabilities with advanced prompting techniques, but they fall short on tasks that require exploration, strategic foresight, and sequential decision-making. Recent works propose to utilize external programs to define search logic, such that LLMs can perform passive tree search to solve more challenging reasoning tasks. Though impressive results have been achieved, there are several fundamental limitations of these approaches. First, passive tree searches are not efficient as they usually require multiple rounds of LLM API calls to solve one single problem. Moreover, passive search methods are not flexible since they need task-specific program designs. Then a natural question arises: can we maintain the tree-search capability of LLMs without the aid of external programs, and can still generate responses that clearly demonstrate the process of a tree-structure search? To this end, we propose a new concept called autonomous tree-search ability of LLM, which can automatically generate a response containing search trajectories for the correct answer. Concretely, we perform search trajectories using capable LLM API via a fixed system prompt, allowing them to perform autonomous tree-search (ATS) right out of the box. Experiments on 4 puzzle games demonstrate our method can achieve huge improvements. The ATS-BFS method outperforms the Chain of Thought approach by achieving an average accuracy improvement of 33%. Compared to Tree of Thoughts, it requires 65.6% or 47.7% less GPT-api cost to attain a comparable level of accuracy. Moreover, we have collected data using the ATS prompt method and fine-tuned LLaMA. This approach yield a greater improvement compared to the ones fine-tuned on CoT data. Specifically, it outperforms CoT-tuned LLaMAs by an average of 40.6% and 38.5% for LLaMA2-7B and LLaMA2-13B, respectively.