TSLM: Tree-Structured Language Modeling for Divergent Thinking

Doyoung Kim, JaeHyeok Doo, Minjoon Seo

International Conference on Learning Representations 2026 (ICLR 2026) Conference

Language models generate reasoning sequentially, preventing them from decoupling irrelevant exploration paths during search. We introduce Tree-Structured Language Modeling (TSLM), which uses special tokens to encode branching structure, enabling models to generate and selectively expand multiple search paths within a single generation process. By training on complete search trees including both successful and failed attempts, TSLM learns to internalize systematic exploration without redundant recomputation of shared prefixes. TSLM achieves 100\% accuracy on Game of 24 (vs. 17\% sequential baseline), robust extrapolation to 20×20 grids (91.5\% vs. 42.7\% for Tree-of-Thought), and superior inference efficiency by avoiding the multiple independent forward passes required by external search methods. These results suggest a new paradigm of inference-time scaling for robust reasoning, demonstrating that supervised learning on complete tree-structured traces provides an efficient alternative for developing systematic exploration capabilities in language models.