Tree of Thoughts (ToT) | Prompt Engineering Guide

For complex tasks that require exploration or strategic lookahead, traditional or simple prompting techniques fall short. Yao et el. (2023) (opens in a new tab) and Long (2023) (opens in a new tab) recently proposed Tree of Thoughts (ToT), a framework that generalizes over chain-of-thought prompting and encourages exploration over thoughts that serve as intermediate steps for general problem solving with language models. ToT maintains a tree of thoughts, where thoughts represent coherent language sequences that serve as intermediate steps toward solving a problem. This approach enables an LM to self-evaluate the progress through intermediate thoughts made towards solving a problem through a deliberate reasoning process. The LM's ability to generate and evaluate thoughts is then combined with search algorithms (e.g., breadth-first search and depth-first search) to enable systematic exploration of thoughts with lookahead and backtracking. The ToT framework is illustrated below: Image S

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• Nguyen Hoang Thao