aiqbench analysis
This research introduces ExTS, a novel tree-search policy that optimizes budget allocation for LLM agents by treating expansion as a value-of-information decision rather than relying on standard exploration bonuses. By incorporating discriminative reward shaping and quality-conditioned branching, the method achieves consistent performance gains across diverse tasks like code generation and molecular elucidation without requiring task-specific tuning. The accompanying diagnostics also offer practical insights into the structural differences of budget-constrained search problems, aiding in future adaptation strategies.
Exploit More, Explore Smarter for Budget-Constrained Agentic Search
arXiv:2608.23848v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Budget-constrained agentic search arises when an LLM agent must refine candidates under a small evaluation budget, because validation is expensive, generation requires multiple model calls, or both. In this regime, standard MCTS allocates budget poorly: exploration bonuses dominate at low visit counts, unpromising siblings are expanded before promising chains can deepen, and branching is independent of node quality. We introduce ExTS, a tree-search policy that treats expansion itself as a value-of-information decision. ExTS combines three mechanisms: discriminative reward shaping to separate candidates under narrow score distributions, a stochastic virtual child that estimates the value of creating a new branch from the parent's reward history, and quality-conditioned branching that expands only when a node's score justifies the budget cost. Across prompt optimization, code generation, molecular structure elucidation, and agentic workflow optimization, ExTS is competitive with or improves over task-specific tree-search baselines, with an average relative gain of +5.5% using a single fixed configuration. We further introduce pilot-run diagnostics that characterize what makes budget-constrained agentic search problems structurally different from one another, providing both understanding of the problem space and practical guidance for adaptation.
Abstract:Budget-constrained agentic search arises when an LLM agent must refine candidates under a small evaluation budget, because validation is expensive, generation requires multiple model calls, or both. In this regime, standard MCTS allocates budget poorly: exploration bonuses dominate at low visit counts, unpromising siblings are expanded before promising chains can deepen, and branching is independent of node quality. We introduce ExTS, a tree-search policy that treats expansion itself as a value-of-information decision. ExTS combines three mechanisms: discriminative reward shaping to separate candidates under narrow score distributions, a stochastic virtual child that estimates the value of creating a new branch from the parent's reward history, and quality-conditioned branching that expands only when a node's score justifies the budget cost. Across prompt optimization, code generation, molecular structure elucidation, and agentic workflow optimization, ExTS is competitive with or improves over task-specific tree-search baselines, with an average relative gain of +5.5% using a single fixed configuration. We further introduce pilot-run diagnostics that characterize what makes budget-constrained agentic search problems structurally different from one another, providing both understanding of the problem space and practical guidance for adaptation.
Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
arXiv:2608.23848 [cs.AI]
(or arXiv:2608.23848v1 [cs.AI] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.23848 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 279 words
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