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Wider or Deeper? Scaling LLM Inference-Time Compute with Adaptive Tree Search (arxiv.org)
3 points by vrm on Jul 2, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: At each step, this search decides whether to try a fresh answer or improve an existing one using feedback like test results, instead of just generating many answers and picking the best. On coding tasks it beat repeated sampling and standard tree search.

Abstract · Wider or Deeper? Scaling LLM Inference-Time Compute with Adaptive Branching Tree Search

Recent advances demonstrate that increasing inference-time computation can significantly boost the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Although repeated sampling (i.e., generating multiple candidate outputs) is a highly effective strategy, it does not leverage external feedback signals for refinement, which are often available in tasks like coding. In this work, we propose Adaptive Branching Monte Carlo Tree Search (AB-MCTS), a novel inference-time framework that generalizes repeated sampling with principled multi-turn exploration and exploitation. At each node in the search tree, AB-MCTS dynamically decides whether to "go wider" by expanding new candidate responses or "go deeper" by revisiting existing ones based on external feedback signals. We evaluate our method on complex coding and engineering tasks using frontier models. Empirical results show that AB-MCTS consistently outperforms both repeated sampling and standard MCTS, underscoring the importance of combining the response diversity of LLMs with multi-turn solution refinement for effective inference-time scaling. Code is available at https://github.com/SakanaAI/treequest .

Yuichi Inoue, Kou Misaki, Yuki Imajuku, So Kuroki, Taishi Nakamura, Takuya Akiba
arXiv:2503.04412 · cs.AI · submitted Mar 6, 2025 · updated Nov 7, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted as a spotlight at NeurIPS 2025

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