# SELT: Self-Evaluation Tree Search for LLMs with Task Decomposition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.07557 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07557/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [Scaling LLM Test-Time Compute Optimally can be More Effective than Scaling Model Parameters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03314/) (2024)
- [Reasoning with Language Model is Planning with World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14992/) (2023)
- [Language Agent Tree Search Unifies Reasoning Acting and Planning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04406/) (2023)
- [ReST-MCTS*: LLM Self-Training via Process Reward Guided Tree Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03816/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models as Commonsense Knowledge for Large-Scale Task Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14078/) (2023)
- [Language Modeling Is Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10668/) (2023)
- [Accessing GPT-4 level Mathematical Olympiad Solutions via Monte Carlo Tree Self-refine with LLaMa-3 8B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07394/) (2024)
- [Toward Self-Improvement of LLMs via Imagination, Searching, and Criticizing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12253/) (2024)
- [LLaMA-Berry: Pairwise Optimization for O1-like Olympiad-Level Mathematical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02884/) (2024)
- [Seal-Tools: Self-Instruct Tool Learning Dataset for Agent Tuning and Detailed Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08355/) (2024)

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

- [The Horizon Gap: Planning, Memory, Execution, Training, and Evaluation for Long-Horizon LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.06663/) (2026)
- [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)

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in a wide range of applications, their performance often degrades in complex reasoning tasks. In this work, we introduce SELT (Self-Evaluation LLM Tree Search), a novel framework that leverages a modified Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to enhance LLM reasoning without relying on external reward models. By redefining the Upper Confidence Bound scoring to align with intrinsic self-evaluation capabilities of LLMs and decomposing the inference process into atomic subtasks augmented with semantic clustering at each node, SELT effectively balances exploration and exploitation, reduces redundant reasoning paths, and mitigates hallucination. We validate our approach on challenging benchmarks, including the knowledge-based MMLU and the Tool Learning dataset Seal-Tools, where SELT achieves significant improvements in answer accuracy and reasoning robustness compared to baseline methods. Notably, our framework operates without task-specific fine-tuning, demonstrating strong generalizability across diverse reasoning tasks. Relevant results and code are available at https://github.com/fairyshine/SELT .