Tree of Problems: Improving structured problem solving with compositionality

Armel Randy Zebaze, Benoît Sagot, Rachel Bawden


Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across multipletasks through in-context learning. For complex reasoning tasks that require step-by-step thinking, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has given impressive results, especially when combined with self-consistency. Nonetheless, some tasks remain particularly difficult for LLMs to solve. Tree of Thoughts (ToT) and Graph of Thoughts (GoT) emerged as alternatives, dividing the complex problem into paths of subproblems. In this paper, we propose Tree of Problems (ToP), a simpler version of ToT, which we hypothesise can work better for complex tasks that can be divided into identical subtasks. Our empirical results show that our approach outperforms ToT and GoT, and in addition per forms better than CoT on complex reasoning tasks. All code for this paper will be made available.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.1001
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
18028–18047
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/Add-Cong-Liu-Florida-Atlantic-University-author-id/2024.emnlp-main.1001/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.1001
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Armel Randy Zebaze, Benoît Sagot, and Rachel Bawden. 2024. Tree of Problems: Improving structured problem solving with compositionality. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 18028–18047, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Tree of Problems: Improving structured problem solving with compositionality (Zebaze et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/Add-Cong-Liu-Florida-Atlantic-University-author-id/2024.emnlp-main.1001.pdf