Ensembling Large Language Models with Process Reward-Guided Tree Search
  for Better Complex Reasoning
Authors: name: Sungjin Park; name: Xiao Liu; name: Yeyun Gong; name: Edward Choi
Published: 2024-12-20 11:14:29

Abstract: Despite recent advances in large language models, open-source models often
struggle to consistently perform well on complex reasoning tasks. Existing
ensemble methods, whether applied at the token or output levels, fail to
address these challenges. In response, we present Language model Ensemble with
Monte Carlo Tree Search (LE-MCTS), a novel framework for process-level
ensembling of language models. LE-MCTS formulates step-by-step reasoning with
an ensemble of language models as a Markov decision process. In this framework,
states represent intermediate reasoning paths, while actions consist of
generating the next reasoning step using one of the language models selected
from a predefined pool. Guided by a process-based reward model, LE-MCTS
performs a tree search over the reasoning steps generated by different language
models, identifying the most accurate reasoning chain. Experimental results on
five mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our approach
outperforms both single language model decoding algorithms and language model
ensemble methods. Notably, LE-MCTS improves performance by 3.6% and 4.3% on the
MATH and MQA datasets, respectively, highlighting its effectiveness in solving
complex reasoning problems.