Framework of Thoughts: A Foundation Framework for Dynamic and Optimized Reasoning based on Chains, Trees, and Graphs
Abstract
Prompting schemes such as Chain of Thought, Tree of Thoughts, and Graph of Thoughts can significantly enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models.However, most existing schemes require users to define static, problem-specific reasoning structures that lack adaptability to dynamic or unseen problem types.Additionally, these schemes are often under-optimized in terms of hyperparameters, prompts, runtime, and prompting cost.To address these limitations, we introduce Framework of Thoughts (FoT) -a generalpurpose foundation framework for implementing and optimizing dynamic reasoning schemes.FoT comes with built-in features for hyperparameter tuning, prompt optimization, parallel execution, and intelligent caching, unlocking the latent performance potential of reasoning schemes.We demonstrate FoT's capabilities by implementing three popular schemes -Tree of Thoughts, Graph of Thoughts, and ProbTree -within FoT.We empirically show that FoT enables significantly faster execution, reduces costs, and achieves better task scores through optimization.We release our codebase to facilitate the development of future dynamic and efficient reasoning schemes.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization
Advanced Software Engineering Methodologies
AI-based Problem Solving and Planning
Publication details
- Journal / source
- Proceedings of the First Workshop on Structured Understanding, Retrieval, and Generation in the LLM Era (SURGeLLM 2026)
- Publisher
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Pages
- 132–151
- Publication date
- 1 January 2026