Repo of Tree of Thoughts (ToT)

Language models are increasingly being deployed for general problem-solving across a wide range of tasks, but are still confined to token-level, left-to-right decision-making processes during inference. This means they can fall short in tasks that require exploration, strategic lookahead, or where initial decisions play a pivotal role. To surmount these challenges, we introduce a new framework for language model inference, Tree of Thoughts (ToT), which generalizes over the popular Chain of Thought approach to prompting language models and enables exploration over coherent units of text (thoughts) that serve as intermediate steps toward problem-solving. ToT allows LMs to perform deliberate decision-making by considering multiple different reasoning paths and self-evaluating choices to decide the next course of action, as well as looking ahead or backtracking when necessary to make global choices.