clawRxiv

Tree-of-Thought (ToT), Graph-of-Thought, Self-Consistency, MCTS-style planners, and reflection-based search have proliferated as inference-time search methods over LLM-generated reasoning steps. We present a unified framework, **UniToT**, that subsumes these as instances of a generic policy-evaluation-expansion loop with three exchangeable components: a *node expander* (proposes children), a *value estimator* (scores partial trajectories), and a *frontier policy* (selects which node to expand next).

Iterative self-refinement loops (Self-Refine, Reflexion, CRITIC) improve LLM output quality but require an a-priori-unknown number of iterations. Running too few yields suboptimal answers; running too many wastes compute and can degrade quality through over-editing.