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Best-of-N (BoN) sampling with a reward model has been shown to be an effective strategy for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences at the time of decoding. BoN sampling is susceptible to a problem known as reward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Yuki Ichihara , Yuu Jinnai , Tetsuro Morimura , Kaito Ariu , Kenshi Abe , Mitsuki Sakamoto , Eiji Uchibe

Best-of-N (BoN) sampling is a widely used inference-time alignment method for language models, whereby N candidate responses are sampled from a reference model and the one with the highest predicted reward according to a learned reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Ved Sriraman , Adam Block

Best-of-N (BoN) is a popular and effective algorithm for aligning language models to human preferences. The algorithm works as follows: at inference time, N samples are drawn from the language model, and the sample with the highest reward,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Afra Amini , Tim Vieira , Elliott Ash , Ryan Cotterell

To ensure that large language model (LLM) responses are helpful and non-toxic, a reward model trained on human preference data is usually used. LLM responses with high rewards are then selected through best-of-$n$ (BoN) sampling or the LLM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Adam X. Yang , Maxime Robeyns , Thomas Coste , Zhengyan Shi , Jun Wang , Haitham Bou-Ammar , Laurence Aitchison

Best-of-$n$ (BoN) sampling is a practical approach for aligning language model outputs with human preferences without expensive fine-tuning. BoN sampling is performed by generating $n$ responses to a prompt and then selecting the sample…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2025-05-07 Claudio Mayrink Verdun , Alex Oesterling , Himabindu Lakkaraju , Flavio P. Calmon

Beam search is the most widely used decoding method for neural machine translation (NMT). In practice, the top-1 candidate with the highest log-probability among the n candidates is selected as the preferred one. However, this top-1…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-03-02 Yidan Zhang , Yu Wan , Dayiheng Liu , Baosong Yang , Zhenan He

This paper concerns the problem of aligning samples from large language models to human preferences using best-of-$n$ sampling, where we draw $n$ samples, rank them, and return the best one. We consider two fundamental problems. First: what…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Lin Gui , Cristina Gârbacea , Victor Veitch

A common paradigm to improve the performance of large language models is optimizing for a reward model. Reward models assign a numerical score to an LLM's output that indicates, for example, how likely it is to align with user preferences…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Hadi Khalaf , Claudio Mayrink Verdun , Alex Oesterling , Himabindu Lakkaraju , Flavio du Pin Calmon

Minimum Bayes Risk (MBR) decoding can significantly improve translation performance of Multilingual Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, MBR decoding is computationally expensive. We show how the recently developed Reinforcement Learning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-15 Guangyu Yang , Jinghong Chen , Weizhe Lin , Bill Byrne

Modern preference alignment techniques, such as Best-of-N (BoN) sampling, rely on reward models trained with pairwise comparison data. While effective at learning relative preferences, this paradigm fails to capture a signal of response…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-14 Hyung Gyu Rho , Sian Lee

Minimum Bayes risk (MBR) decoding outputs the hypothesis with the highest expected utility over the model distribution for some utility function. It has been shown to improve accuracy over beam search in conditional language generation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Julius Cheng , Andreas Vlachos

We introduce Best-of-N (BoN) Jailbreaking, a simple black-box algorithm that jailbreaks frontier AI systems across modalities. BoN Jailbreaking works by repeatedly sampling variations of a prompt with a combination of augmentations - such…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-23 John Hughes , Sara Price , Aengus Lynch , Rylan Schaeffer , Fazl Barez , Sanmi Koyejo , Henry Sleight , Erik Jones , Ethan Perez , Mrinank Sharma

Sampling multiple outputs from a Large Language Model (LLM) and selecting the most frequent (Self-consistency) or highest-scoring (Best-of-N) candidate is a popular approach to achieve higher accuracy in tasks with discrete final answers.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Amin Rakhsha , Kanika Madan , Tianyu Zhang , Amir-massoud Farahmand , Amir Khasahmadi

Minimum Bayes-risk (MBR) decoding has recently gained renewed attention in text generation. MBR decoding considers texts sampled from a model as pseudo-references and selects the text with the highest similarity to the others. Therefore,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Atsumoto Ohashi , Ukyo Honda , Tetsuro Morimura , Yuu Jinnai

Bayesian Optimization (BO) is a common solution to search optimal hyperparameters based on sample observations of a machine learning model. Existing BO algorithms could converge slowly even collapse when the potential observation noise…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-10-10 Lei Cui , Yangguang Li , Xin Lu , Dong An , Fenggang Liu

In NMT we search for the mode of the model distribution to form predictions. The mode and other high-probability translations found by beam search have been shown to often be inadequate in a number of ways. This prevents improving…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-26 Bryan Eikema , Wilker Aziz

Inference-time compute scaling has emerged as a powerful paradigm for improving language model performance on a wide range of tasks, but the question of how best to use the additional compute remains open. A popular approach is BoN…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Zhuohao Yu , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Adam Block

Reward Models (RMs) are crucial for online alignment of language models (LMs) with human preferences. However, RM-based preference-tuning is vulnerable to reward hacking, whereby LM policies learn undesirable behaviors from flawed RMs. By…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Daniel Fein , Max Lamparth , Violet Xiang , Mykel J. Kochenderfer , Nick Haber

Minimum Bayes Risk (MBR) decoding has seen renewed interest as an alternative to traditional generation strategies. While MBR has proven effective in machine translation, where the variability of a language model's outcome space is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Bryan Eikema , Anna Rutkiewicz , Mario Giulianelli

Recent advances in machine translation (MT) have shown that Minimum Bayes Risk (MBR) decoding can be a powerful alternative to beam search decoding, especially when combined with neural-based utility functions. However, the performance of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Markus Freitag , Behrooz Ghorbani , Patrick Fernandes
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