To Backtrack or Not to Backtrack: When Sequential Search Limits Model Reasoning

Tian Qin, David Alvarez-Melis, Samy Jelassi, Eran Malach

Keywords: LLM Reasoning, Backtracking, Test-time Computate

TL;DR: A comparative study of backtracking versus parallel search in LLMs, revealing nuanced trade-offs: backtracking can harm reasoning due to constrained search strategies and verbosity, but is particularly suitable for RL.

Abstract: Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved their reasoning abilities, particularly through techniques involving search and backtracking. Backtracking naturally scales test-time compute by enabling sequential, linearized exploration via long chain-of-thought (CoT) generation. However, this is not the only strategy for scaling test time-compute: parallel sampling with best-of-n selection provides an alternative that generates diverse solutions simultaneously. Despite the growing adoption of sequential search, its advantages over parallel sampling—especially under a fixed compute budget—remain poorly understood. In this paper, we systematically compare these two approaches on two challenging reasoning tasks: CountDown and Sudoku. Surprisingly, we find that sequential search underperforms parallel sampling on CountDown but outperforms it on Sudoku, suggesting that backtracking is not universally beneficial. We identify two factors that can cause backtracking to degrade performance: (1) training on fixed search traces can lock models intro suboptimal strategies, and (2) explicit CoT supervision can discourage ‘implicit‘ (non verbalized) reasoning. Extending our analysis to reinforcement learning (RL), we show that models with backtracking capabilities benefit significantly from RL fine-tuning, while models without backtracking see limited, mixed gains. Together, these findings challenge the assumption that backtracking universally enhances LLM reasoning, instead revealing a complex interaction between task structure, training data, model scale, and learning paradigm.

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Submission Number: 1246