Tree-of-Thought (ToT)

Overview

Proposed in 2023 by Princeton/DeepMind, Tree-of-Thought has the LLM explore multiple candidate thoughts in parallel as a tree, then evaluate and select the most promising branch to continue. It is analogous to minimax search in game trees, applied to language reasoning.

When to apply

ToT suits tasks with wide solution spaces requiring search — creative writing, software architecture decisions, and mathematical proofs. It is more compute-intensive than CoT but improves accuracy on hard reasoning tasks. LangChain and LlamaIndex offer ToT modules.