Revisiting Tree Search for LLMs: Gumbel and Sequential Halving for Budget-Scalable Reasoning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Ugadiarov, Leonid, Kuratov, Yuri, Panov, Aleksandr, Skrynnik, Alexey
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Ugadiarov, Leonid
Kuratov, Yuri
Panov, Aleksandr
Skrynnik, Alexey
author_facet Ugadiarov, Leonid
Kuratov, Yuri
Panov, Aleksandr
Skrynnik, Alexey
contents Neural tree search is a powerful decision-making algorithm widely used in complex domains such as game playing and model-based reinforcement learning. Recent work has applied AlphaZero-style tree search to enhance the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) during inference, but we find that this approach suffers from a scaling failure: on GSM8K and Game24, accuracy drops as the search budget increases. In this paper, we present ReSCALE, an adaptation of Gumbel AlphaZero MCTS that replaces Dirichlet noise and PUCT selection with Gumbel sampling and Sequential Halving, restoring monotonic scaling without changes to the model or its training. ReSCALE reaches 58.4\% on GSM8K and 85.3\% on Game24 at budgets where the baseline degrades. Ablations confirm that Sequential Halving is the primary driver of the improvement.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_21162
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Revisiting Tree Search for LLMs: Gumbel and Sequential Halving for Budget-Scalable Reasoning
Ugadiarov, Leonid
Kuratov, Yuri
Panov, Aleksandr
Skrynnik, Alexey
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Neural tree search is a powerful decision-making algorithm widely used in complex domains such as game playing and model-based reinforcement learning. Recent work has applied AlphaZero-style tree search to enhance the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) during inference, but we find that this approach suffers from a scaling failure: on GSM8K and Game24, accuracy drops as the search budget increases. In this paper, we present ReSCALE, an adaptation of Gumbel AlphaZero MCTS that replaces Dirichlet noise and PUCT selection with Gumbel sampling and Sequential Halving, restoring monotonic scaling without changes to the model or its training. ReSCALE reaches 58.4\% on GSM8K and 85.3\% on Game24 at budgets where the baseline degrades. Ablations confirm that Sequential Halving is the primary driver of the improvement.
title Revisiting Tree Search for LLMs: Gumbel and Sequential Halving for Budget-Scalable Reasoning
topic Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.21162