Short Answer

Beam search does not guarantee the best sequence

Question: Describe the main limitation of using beam search to find an output Y that maximizes Score_B(Y).

Sample answer: Beam search is a heuristic search method that keeps only the top K partial candidates at each step. Because it prunes away many possibilities, it can discard the sequence that would have ended up with the highest score. As a result, it is not guaranteed to return the true best-scoring output.

Key points:

  • Beam search is approximate, not exact.
  • It keeps only the top K candidates during the search.
  • It may miss the output with the highest score.

Rubric: The answer should explain that beam search is approximate, that it retains only the top K candidates, and that this means it is not guaranteed to find the highest-scoring output.

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Updated 2026-08-12

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