@inproceedings{li-etal-2026-llm-inductive,
    title = "{LLM} Inductive Reasoning Through Multi-Agent Enhanced {M}onte {C}arlo Tree Search",
    author = "Li, Xiang  and
      Zhou, Yucheng  and
      Wei, Xiangzhi  and
      Shi, Zesheng  and
      Wan, Haiyuan  and
      Yifan, Gong  and
      Liu, Fangming  and
      Li, Jing",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1178/",
    pages = "23548--23562",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "Existing methods for enhancing the inductive reasoning of large language models (LLMs) at test-time typically depend on iterative self-refinement of hypotheses, which lacks explicit optimization guidance and effective error correction. This often results in superficial rewording and the accumulation of errors. To overcome these limitations, we propose MATSIR, a plug-and-play test-time framework integrating Multi-Agent coordination with Monte Carlo Tree Search to improve Inductive Reasoning. MATSIR incorporates a dual-reward mechanism that provides explicit refinement signals, promoting logically coherent and semantically enriched hypotheses rather than mere rephrasing. Furthermore, it enables trajectory-level error correction through backtracking and pruning, allowing the system to recover from erroneous intermediate hypotheses. Experiments on five benchmarks across four LLMs show that MATSIR consistently outperforms previous best methods, yielding the highest average improvement of +4.9{\%} on QWQ-32B and all-round improvement on Deepseek-V3. Our findings highlight that explicit guided search with built-in error correction is essential for advancing inductive reasoning in LLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/SolarWindRider/MATSIR"
}