English

Best-of-$\infty$ -- Asymptotic Performance of Test-Time LLM Ensembling

Machine Learning 2026-03-05 v3 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

We study best-of-NN for large language models (LLMs) where the selection is based on majority voting. In particular, we analyze the limit NN \to \infty, which we denote as \boinflower. While this approach achieves impressive performance in the limit, it requires an infinite test-time budget. To address this, we propose an adaptive generation scheme that selects NN based on answer agreement, thereby efficiently allocating inference-time computation. Beyond adaptivity, we extend the framework to weighted ensembles of multiple LLMs, showing that such mixtures can outperform any individual model. The optimal ensemble weighting is formulated and efficiently computed as a mixed-integer linear program. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.21091,
  title  = {Best-of-$\infty$ -- Asymptotic Performance of Test-Time LLM Ensembling},
  author = {Junpei Komiyama and Daisuke Oba and Masafumi Oyamada},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.21091},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

To appear at ICLR2026. Our code is available at https://github.com/jkomiyama/BoInf-code-publish/. Updated the title