Tree of Thoughts
Also called ToT.
Tree of Thoughts (ToT) lets a model explore multiple reasoning branches as a search tree, evaluating partial solutions and backtracking, rather than committing to a single left-to-right chain of thought.
Description
Yao et al. combined model-generated candidate thoughts, model self-evaluation of states, and breadth- or depth-first search, producing large gains on tasks such as the Game of 24 that require planning or lookahead.
Sources
- Yao et al. (2023). Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models.
Cite this entry
Protologue. (2026). Tree of Thoughts. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.0.0, PTL-0033). https://protologue.com/t/tree-of-thoughts/
BibTeX
@misc{protologue_tree_of_thoughts,
title = {Tree of Thoughts},
author = {{Protologue}},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques, v1.0.0},
note = {Entry PTL-0033},
url = {https://protologue.com/t/tree-of-thoughts/}
}