NLP Lineage

17 May 2023 · Reasoning

Tree of thoughts

Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models

S. Yao, D. Yu, J. Zhao, I. Shafran, T. Griffiths, Y. Cao, K. Narasimhan

Date
17 May 2023
What the date marks
arXiv submission
Kind
Technique
Organisation
Princeton / Google DeepMind
Access
MIT
Other dates
NeurIPS 2023
Threads
In the guided tour
Chapter 12. Thinking longer
Learning phases
7. Agents

Notable: no later milestone in the data is documented as descending from it. How levels are decided

Read the primary source (arxiv.org)

Full summary in progress. Until then, this page shows the milestone's record from the research data.

What it changed

Before it

Reasoning ran forward in a single line, or in several independent lines aggregated by vote.

The problem

Some problems need exploring alternatives, evaluating them, and backtracking.

What it introduced

Treat reasoning steps as nodes in a tree, with the model proposing and scoring branches, plus search over them.

Why it matters

It brought classical search into language-model reasoning, the conceptual bridge to test-time compute.

What modern models inherit

Search over reasoning as a way to spend inference compute.

What came next

Verifier-guided search, process supervision, and the RL reasoning models.

Before and after

The milestones it descends from, and the milestones that descend from it. Work developed alongside it is not counted. Weak links are left out unless you include them.

Before: where it came from

Tree of thoughts has 20 documented ancestors across 6 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing its direct parents and the 10 turning points among them.

Tree of thoughts has 20 documented ancestors across 6 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing all of them.

Tree of thoughts has 29 recorded ancestors, including indirect ones, across 6 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing its direct parents and the 10 turning points among them.

Tree of thoughts has 29 recorded ancestors, including indirect ones, across 6 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing all of them.

  1. 2023Tree of thoughtsThis milestone.
  2. 2022Self-consistencyTree of thoughts was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  3. 2022Chain of thought Turning pointTree of thoughts built directly on thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  4. 2020GPT-3 Turning pointChain of thought was influenced by thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  5. 2020Scaling laws Turning pointGPT-3 was influenced by thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  6. 2019Sparse Transformer Turning pointGPT-3 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  7. 2019GPT-2 Turning pointGPT-3 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  8. 2019WebTextGPT-2 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  9. 2018GPT-1GPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  10. 2017Transformer Turning pointGPT-2 built directly on this
    Sparse Transformer built directly on this
    Scaling laws built directly on this    Chapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  11. 2016Layer normGPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  12. 2015Residual connectionsTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  13. 2015LM pretraining Turning pointGPT-1 was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  14. 2015BPE tokenizationGPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  15. 2015Luong attentionTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  16. 2014AdamTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  17. 2014Seq2seq Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  18. 2014Attention Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  19. 2014GRU / encoder-decoderAttention built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  20. 1997LSTM Turning pointSeq2seq built directly on thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  21. 1990Recurrent networksLSTM was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  1. 2023Tree of thoughtsThis milestone.
  2. 2022Self-consistencyTree of thoughts was influenced by thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  3. 2022Chain of thought Turning pointTree of thoughts built directly on thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  4. 2020GPT-3 Turning pointChain of thought was influenced by thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  5. 2020Scaling laws Turning pointGPT-3 was influenced by thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  6. 2019Sparse Transformer Turning pointGPT-3 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  7. 2019GPT-2 Turning pointGPT-3 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  8. 2019WebTextGPT-2 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  9. 2019Transformer-XLSparse Transformer was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  10. 2018GPT-1GPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  11. 2018ELMoGPT-1 was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  12. 2018ULMFiTGPT-1 was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  13. 2017CoVeELMo was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  14. 2017Transformer Turning pointGPT-2 built directly on this
    Sparse Transformer built directly on this
    Scaling laws built directly on this    Chapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  15. 2017ConvS2STransformer was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  16. 2016Layer normGPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  17. 2015Residual connectionsTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  18. 2015LM pretraining Turning pointGPT-1 was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  19. 2015BPE tokenizationGPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  20. 2015Luong attentionTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  21. 2014AdamTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  22. 2014GloVeELMo built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  23. 2014Seq2seq Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  24. 2014Attention Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  25. 2014GRU / encoder-decoderAttention built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  26. 2013word2vecELMo was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  27. 2011NLP from scratchELMo was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  28. 2003Neural LMNLP from scratch was influenced by this
    word2vec was influenced by this    Chapter 1. Language as probability
  29. 1997LSTM Turning pointSeq2seq built directly on this
    ELMo built directly on this    Chapter 1. Language as probability
  30. 1990Recurrent networksLSTM was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability

After: what it led to

No documented descendants are recorded for Tree of thoughts without weak links.

No documented descendants are recorded for Tree of thoughts without weak links.

Tree of thoughts has 21 recorded descendants, including indirect ones, across 4 chapters, reaching forward to Qwen3.8 in 2026. Showing its direct descendants.

Tree of thoughts has 21 recorded descendants, including indirect ones, across 4 chapters, reaching forward to Qwen3.8 in 2026. Showing all of them.

  1. 2023Tree of thoughtsThis milestone.
  2. 2024Test-time computewas influenced by Tree of thoughts (indirect influence)Chapter 12. Thinking longer
  3. 2024o3 announcedwas influenced by Test-time compute (indirect influence)Chapter 12. Thinking longer
  4. 2025DeepSeek-R1was influenced by Test-time computeChapter 12. Thinking longer
  5. 2025Deep researchwas influenced by o3 releasedChapter 13. Models that act
  6. 2025o3 releasedsucceeded o3 announcedChapter 12. Thinking longer
  7. 2025Qwen3was influenced by DeepSeek-R1Chapter 8. The weights get out
  8. 2025IMO goldwas influenced by Test-time computeChapter 12. Thinking longer
  9. 2025gpt-osswas influenced by DeepSeek-R1 (indirect influence)Chapter 8. The weights get out
  10. 2025GPT-5built directly on o3 releasedChapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  11. 2025GLM-4.5was influenced by DeepSeek-R1 (indirect influence)Chapter 8. The weights get out
  12. 2025IMO-ProofBenchwas influenced by IMO goldChapter 12. Thinking longer
  13. 2025GPT-5.1built directly on GPT-5Chapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  14. 2025GPT-5.2built directly on GPT-5.1Chapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  15. 2026GPT-5.3-Codexbuilt directly on GPT-5.2Chapter 13. Models that act
  16. 2026Gemini 3 Deep Thinkwas influenced by IMO goldChapter 12. Thinking longer
  17. 2026Qwen3.5built directly on Qwen3Chapter 8. The weights get out
  18. 2026GPT-5.4built directly on GPT-5.3-CodexChapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  19. 2026GPT-5.5built directly on GPT-5.4Chapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  20. 2026GLM-5.2built directly on GLM-4.5Chapter 8. The weights get out
  21. 2026GPT-5.6 Solbuilt directly on GPT-5.5Chapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  22. 2026Qwen3.8built directly on Qwen3.5Chapter 8. The weights get out

Direct links and their sources

Where it came from

Built directly on

Influenced by

What it led to

Influenced