English
Related papers

Related papers: Sampling-Efficient Test-Time Scaling: Self-Estimat…

200 papers

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

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

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

Inference-time alignment enhances the performance of large language models without requiring additional training or fine-tuning but presents challenges due to balancing computational efficiency with high-quality output. Best-of-N (BoN)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-04 Jiahao Qiu , Yifu Lu , Yifan Zeng , Jiacheng Guo , Jiayi Geng , Chenhao Zhu , Xinzhe Juan , Ling Yang , Huazheng Wang , Kaixuan Huang , Yue Wu , Mengdi Wang

Allocating more computation during inference time (test-time scaling) improves language model performance, especially for reasoning tasks. However, popular methods like Best-of-$N$ sampling often show diminishing returns as $N$ increases.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Yung-Chen Tang , Pin-Yu Chen , Andrea Cavallaro

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

Inference-time computation offers a powerful axis for scaling the performance of language models. However, naively increasing computation in techniques like Best-of-N sampling can lead to performance degradation due to reward hacking.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-09 Audrey Huang , Adam Block , Qinghua Liu , Nan Jiang , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Dylan J. Foster

A simple yet effective method for inference-time alignment of generative models is Best-of-$N$ (BoN), where $N$ outcomes are sampled from a reference policy, evaluated using a proxy reward model, and the highest-scoring one is selected.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-09 Gholamali Aminian , Idan Shenfeld , Amir R. Asadi , Ahmad Beirami , Youssef Mroueh

Increasing test-time computation is a straightforward approach to enhancing the quality of responses in Large Language Models (LLMs). While Best-of-N sampling and Self-Consistency with majority voting are simple and effective, they require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Chengsong Huang , Langlin Huang , Jixuan Leng , Jiacheng Liu , Jiaxin Huang

Language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reasoning tasks through test-time scaling techniques like best-of-N sampling and tree search. However, these approaches often demand substantial computational resources, creating…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Woomin Song , Saket Dingliwal , Sai Muralidhar Jayanthi , Bhavana Ganesh , Jinwoo Shin , Aram Galstyan , Sravan Babu Bodapati

Test-time scaling is a family of techniques to improve LLM outputs at inference time by performing extra computation. To the best of our knowledge, test-time scaling has been limited to domains with verifiably correct answers, like…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Tomas Ruiz , Siyao Peng , Barbara Plank , Carsten Schwemmer

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

Using the bit string generation problem as a case study, we theoretically compare two standard methods for adapting large language models to new tasks. The first, referred to as supervised fine-tuning, involves training a new next token…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-31 Seamus Somerstep , Vinod Raman , Unique Subedi , Yuekai Sun

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

Best-of-$n$ is a widely used test-time scaling approach for LLM inference. Yet despite evidence that LLMs exhibit complementary strengths across tasks, traditionally best-of-$n$ relies on a single model to generate responses. We propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-08 Jonathan Geuter , Gregor Kornhardt

Test-time scaling has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by allocating additional computational resources during inference. However, this paradigm is inherently…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Shengyin Sun , Yiming Li , Xing Li , Yingzhao Lian , Weizhe Lin , Hui-Ling Zhen , Zhiyuan Yang , Chen Chen , Xianzhi Yu , Mingxuan Yuan , Chen Ma

Best-of-N selection is a key technique for improving the reasoning performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) through increased test-time computation. Current state-of-the-art methods often employ computationally intensive reward models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Zhewei Kang , Xuandong Zhao , Dawn Song

Test-time scaling aims to improve language model performance by leveraging additional compute during inference. Many works have empirically studied techniques such as Best-of-N (BoN) and Rejection Sampling (RS) that make use of a verifier…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Florian E. Dorner , Yatong Chen , André F. Cruz , Fanny Yang

Recent studies have indicated that effectively utilizing inference-time compute is crucial for attaining better performance from large language models (LLMs). In this work, we propose a novel inference-aware fine-tuning paradigm, in which…

Test-time scaling has emerged as a critical avenue for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Though the straight-forward ''best-of-$N$'' (BoN) strategy has already demonstrated significant improvements in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Muheng Li , Jian Qian , Wenlong Mou
‹ Prev 1 2 3 10 Next ›