Large language models (LLMs) face persistent challenges when handling long-context tasks, most notably the “lost in the middle” issue, where information located in the middle of a long input tends to be underutilized. Some existing methods that reduce input have the risk of discarding key information, while others that extend context windows often lead to attention dispersion. To address these limitations, we propose Tree of Agents (TOA), a multi-agent reasoning framework that segments the input into chunks processed by independent agents. Each agent generates its local cognition, then agents dynamically exchange information for collaborative reasoning along tree-structured paths. TOA enables agents to probe different reasoning orders for multi-perspective understanding, effectively mitigating position bias and reducing hallucinations. To improve processing efficiency, we incorporate prefix-hash caching and adaptive pruning strategies, achieving significant performance improvements with comparable API overhead. Experiments show that TOA, powered by compact LLaMA3.1-8B, significantly outperforms multiple baselines and demonstrates comparable performance to the latest and much larger commercial models, such as Gemini1.5-pro, on various long-context tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/Aireduce952/Tree-of-Agents.

As a precious cultural heritage of human beings, classical Chinese poetry has a very unique writing style and often contains special words that rarely appear in general Chinese texts, posting critical challenges for natural language processing. Little effort has been made in the literature for processing texts from classical Chinese poetry. This study fills in this gap with TopWORDS-Poetry, an unsupervised method that can achieve reliable text segmentation and word discovery for classical Chinese poetry simultaneously without pre-given vocabulary or training corpus. Experimental studies confirm that TopWORDS-Poetry can successfully recognize unique poetry words, such as named entities and literary allusions, from metrical poems of Complete Tang Poetry and segment these poetry lines into sequences of meaningful words with high quality.

Processing open-domain Chinese texts has been a critical bottleneck in computational linguistics for decades, partially because text segmentation and word discovery often entangle with each other in this challenging scenario. No existing methods yet can achieve effective text segmentation and word discovery simultaneously in open domain. This study fills in this gap by proposing a novel method called TopWORDS-Seg based on Bayesian inference, which enjoys robust performance and transparent interpretation when no training corpus and domain vocabulary are available. Advantages of TopWORDS-Seg are demonstrated by a series of experimental studies.