Demystifying Chains, Trees, and Graphs of Thoughts
2024 — survey and taxonomy of LLM reasoning topologies
Unified survey: reasoning as a graph — path (CoT), tree (ToT), general graph (GoT) — plus reasoning schedule.
Besta, M., Memedi, F., Zhang, Z., Gerstenberger, R., Piao, G., Blach, N., Nyczyk, P., Copik, M., Kwaśniewski, G., Müller, J., Gianinazzi, L., Kubicek, A., Niewiadomski, H., O’Mahony, A., Mutlu, O., & Hoefler, T. (2024). Demystifying Chains, Trees, and Graphs of Thoughts. arXiv:2401.14295.
Why we cite it
Primary bibliography anchor for Reasoning Topology: separates topology (path / tree / graph) from schedule (BFS, DFS, heuristics). Use when comparing literature names to our event-log capture types.
Claims we use
- Taxonomy — CoT ≈ path graph; ToT ≈ tree; GoT ≈ general graph.
- Two axes — structure of thoughts vs algorithm that walks the structure.
Author (primary)
Maciej Besta — full author list in the original paper.
Corpus stance
Context — survey; empirical rankings are task- and model-specific.
Related works in this cluster
- Chain-of-Thought Prompting (CoT)
- Self-Consistency (parallel paths)
- Tree of Thoughts (ToT)
- Graph of Thoughts (GoT)
- Network-of-Thought (NoT — preprint)