Papers › MCTS-RAG: Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Monte Carlo Tree Search

MCTS-RAG: Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Monte Carlo Tree Search

26 Mar 2025arXiv:2503.20757archive 2025-07-28

Yunhai Hu, Yilun Zhao, Chen Zhao, Arman Cohan

We introduce MCTS-RAG, a novel approach that enhances the reasoning capabilities of small language models on knowledge-intensive tasks by leveraging retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to provide relevant context and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to refine reasoning paths. MCTS-RAG dynamically integrates retrieval and reasoning through an iterative decision-making process. Unlike standard RAG methods, which typically retrieve information independently from reasoning and thus integrate knowledge suboptimally, or conventional MCTS reasoning, which depends solely on internal model knowledge without external facts, MCTS-RAG combines structured reasoning with adaptive retrieval. This integrated approach enhances decision-making, reduces hallucinations, and ensures improved factual accuracy and response consistency. The experimental results on multiple reasoning and knowledge-intensive datasets datasets (i.e., ComplexWebQA, GPQA, and FoolMeTwice) show that our method enables small-scale LMs to achieve performance comparable to frontier LLMs like GPT-4o by effectively scaling inference-time compute, setting a new standard for reasoning in small-scale models.

Paper PDF Code

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

yale-nlp/mcts-rag officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Decision Making RAG Retrieval Retrieval-augmented Generation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Adam Attention Attention Dropout BART BERT BPE Dense Connections Dropout Layer Normalization Linear Layer Linear Warmup With Linear Decay Multi-Head Attention RAG Residual Connection Softmax Weight Decay WordPiece

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections