Beyond Fixed Budgets: Characterizing the Inelasticity and Limitations of Tree-of-Thought Reasoning Strategies (opens in new tab)

Tree of Thought (ToT) search has become a promising direction for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models, but deploying these methods in practice raises a question that has received little systematic attention: how do different search strategies behave under varying compute budgets, model sizes, and problem difficulties? In this work, we evaluate two representative ToT methods; DPTS, a Monte Carlo tree search based approac...