Tree-of-Code: A Hybrid Approach for Robust Complex Task Planning and Execution

The exceptional capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have substantially accelerated the rapid rise and widespread adoption of agents. Recent studies have demonstrated that generating Python code to consolidate LLM-based agents' actions into a unified action space (CodeAct) is a promising approach for developing real-world LLM agents. However, this step-by-step code generation approach often lacks consistency and robustness, leading to instability in agent applications, particularly for complex reasoning and out-of-domain tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Tree-of-Code (ToC) to tackle the challenges of complex problem planning and execution with an end-to-end mechanism. By integrating key ideas from both Tree-of-Thought and CodeAct, ToC combines their strengths to enhance solution exploration. In our framework, each final code execution result is treated as a node in the decision tree, with a breadth-first search strategy employed to explore potential solutions. The final outcome is determined through a voting mechanism based on the outputs of the nodes. Experimental results on complicated task datasets demonstrate that our method provides more stable results compared to Tree-of-Thought and achieves higher accuracy than CodeAct.