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feat: Adaptive MCTS with batch parallel simulation#1

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CyberGhost007 wants to merge 1 commit intomainfrom
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feat: Adaptive MCTS with batch parallel simulation#1
CyberGhost007 wants to merge 1 commit intomainfrom
feature/adaptive-mcts

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@CyberGhost007 CyberGhost007 commented Mar 10, 2026

Summary

  • Dynamic iteration bounds — Phase 2 runs 8-50 iterations (was fixed 25), Phase 1 runs 5-30 (was fixed 15). Easy queries converge early and stop, hard queries get more exploration budget.
  • Multi-signal convergence detection — Three independent stop signals: top-k node stability, reward variance stability, and confidence threshold. Any one triggers early exit after min_iterations floor.
  • Branch pruning — Internal nodes with 3+ visits and avg reward below 0.25 get pruned along with their entire subtree. Select/expand skip pruned branches, no more wasting LLM calls on irrelevant sections.
  • Exploration constant decay — UCB1's C parameter decays from 2.0 → 0.5 (linear or cosine) over the search lifetime. Explore broadly first, exploit high-scoring paths later.
  • Batch parallel simulation (virtual loss trick) — Selects K=4 nodes per iteration using virtual visits for diversity (AlphaGo-style), fires K LLM calls in parallel via ThreadPoolExecutor, then backpropagates real rewards. Cuts wall-clock search time by ~4x without changing search quality.
  • SearchStats transparency — New dataclass tracks iterations used, convergence reason, pruned branches, coverage %, mean reward, and variance. Wired through QueryResult and ChatMessage for full observability.
  • Full backward compatibilityMCTS_ADAPTIVE=false falls back to exact prior behavior: fixed iteration counts, static exploration constant, original early stopping heuristic.

Files changed

File What changed
treerag/config.py 16 new MCTSConfig fields (adaptive bounds, convergence, pruning, decay, batch size) + env var parsing
treerag/mcts.py Core engine rewrite: _get_exploration_constant, _check_convergence, _prune_branches, _apply_virtual_loss, _remove_virtual_loss, _simulate_batch, updated search_document/search_meta loops
treerag/models.py pruned flag on TreeNode/FolderDocEntry, SearchStats dataclass, stats fields on QueryResult
treerag/pipeline.py All MCTS callers updated to unpack (results, stats) tuples, stats wired through to output
.env.example 16 new env vars documented
tests/test_config.py Tests for adaptive defaults, env parsing, disabled mode
tests/test_models.py Tests for pruned flag reset, SearchStats creation and serialization

Test plan

  • pytest tests/ — 25 tests pass
  • Manual test with MCTS_ADAPTIVE=true (default) — verify console shows convergence info and reduced iteration counts
  • Manual test with MCTS_ADAPTIVE=false — verify identical behavior to previous version
  • Manual test with large multi-doc folder — verify parallel batch simulation + per-doc stats collection
  • Verify MCTS_SIMULATION_BATCH_SIZE=1 degrades gracefully to sequential mode

- Dynamic iteration bounds (8-50 for Phase 2, 5-30 for Phase 1)
  instead of fixed counts, saving LLM calls on easy queries
- Multi-signal convergence detection: top-k stability, reward
  variance stability, and confidence threshold (any triggers stop)
- Branch pruning: marks consistently low-scoring subtrees as pruned,
  skipping them in select/expand to avoid wasting LLM calls
- Exploration constant decay (linear/cosine) from 2.0 to 0.5 over
  search lifetime — explore broadly first, exploit later
- Batch simulation with virtual loss trick (AlphaGo-style): selects
  K nodes per iteration using virtual visits for diversity, fires K
  LLM calls in parallel, then backpropagates real rewards — cuts
  wall-clock time by ~4x without changing search quality
- SearchStats dataclass for transparent reporting of convergence,
  pruning, and coverage metrics in all results
- Full backward compat: adaptive=False falls back to exact prior
  behavior (fixed iterations, static C, original early stopping)

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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