Atom of Thoughts for Markov LLM Test-Time Scaling
Authors: name: Fengwei Teng; name: Zhaoyang Yu; name: Quan Shi; name: Jiayi Zhang; name: Chenglin Wu; name: Yuyu Luo
Published: 2025-02-17 16:52:42

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve superior performance through
training-time scaling, and test-time scaling further enhances their
capabilities by conducting effective reasoning during inference. However, as
the scale of reasoning increases, existing test-time scaling methods suffer
from accumulated historical information, which not only wastes computational
resources but also interferes with effective reasoning. To address this issue,
we observe that complex reasoning progress is often achieved by solving a
sequence of independent subquestions, each being self-contained and verifiable.
These subquestions are essentially atomic questions, relying primarily on their
current state rather than accumulated history, similar to the memoryless
transitions in a Markov process. Based on this observation, we propose Atom of
Thoughts (AoT), where each state transition in the reasoning process consists
of decomposing the current question into a dependency-based directed acyclic
graph and contracting its subquestions, forming a new atomic question state.
This iterative decomposition-contraction process continues until reaching
directly solvable atomic questions, naturally realizing Markov transitions
between question states. Furthermore, these atomic questions can be seamlessly
integrated into existing test-time scaling methods, enabling AoT to serve as a
plug-in enhancement for improving reasoning capabilities. Experiments across
six benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of AoT both as a standalone
framework and a plug-in enhancement. Notably, on HotpotQA, when applied to
gpt-4o-mini, AoT achieves an 80.6% F1 score, surpassing o3-mini by 3.4% and
DeepSeek-R1 by 10.6%. The code will be available at
https://github.com/qixucen/atom.