Monte Carlo Tree Search in Large Language Models: How Selection, Expansion, Simulation, and Backpropagation Guide Deliberate Reasoning
Standard autoregressive language models generate text token by token via left-to-right greedy decoding or stochastic sampling. While this System 1 approach suffices for fluency and single-turn synthesis, it struggles with complex mathematical reasoning, multi-step logical deduction, and long-horizon planning. Because autoregressive decoders lack native backtracking mechanisms, an error introduced at step t persists and compounds across all subsequent steps t+1 through T. To overcome this struct
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