Don't Get Lost in the Trees: Streamlining LLM Reasoning by Overcoming Tree Search Exploration Pitfalls
This work addresses computational bottlenecks in LLM reasoning for practical applications, representing an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackled inefficiencies in tree search algorithms for LLM reasoning, specifically over-exploration and under-exploration, by proposing FETCH, a framework that improves reasoning accuracy and computational efficiency on datasets like GSM8K, GSM-Plus, and MATH.
Recent advancements in tree search algorithms guided by verifiers have significantly enhanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), but at the cost of increased computational resources. In this work, we identify two key challenges contributing to this inefficiency: $\textit{over-exploration}$ due to redundant states with semantically equivalent content, and $\textit{under-exploration}$ caused by high variance in verifier scoring leading to frequent trajectory switching. To address these issues, we propose FETCH, an e$\textbf{f}$fici$\textbf{e}$nt $\textbf{t}$ree sear$\textbf{ch}$ framework, which is a flexible, plug-and-play system compatible with various tree search algorithms. Our framework mitigates over-exploration by merging semantically similar states using agglomerative clustering of text embeddings obtained from a fine-tuned SimCSE model. To tackle under-exploration, we enhance verifiers by incorporating temporal difference learning with adjusted $λ$-returns during training to reduce variance, and employing a verifier ensemble to aggregate scores during inference. Experiments on GSM8K, GSM-Plus, and MATH datasets demonstrate that our methods significantly improve reasoning accuracy and computational efficiency across four different tree search algorithms, paving the way for more practical applications of LLM-based reasoning. The code is available at https://github.com/Soistesimmer/Fetch.