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Related papers: Soft Best-of-n Sampling for Model Alignment

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Test-time scaling enhances large language model performance by allocating additional compute resources during inference. Best-of-N (BoN) sampling serves as a common sampling-based scaling technique, broadening the search space in parallel…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Yiming Wang , Pei Zhang , Siyuan Huang , Baosong Yang , Zhuosheng Zhang , Fei Huang , Rui Wang

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

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-30 Yuu Jinnai , Tetsuro Morimura , Kaito Ariu , Kenshi Abe

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

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

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

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

Best-of-N (BoN) sampling, a common strategy for test-time scaling of Large Language Models (LLMs), relies on reward models to select the best candidate solution from multiple generations. However, traditional reward models often assign…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-20 Yantao Liu , Zijun Yao , Rui Min , Yixin Cao , Lei Hou , Juanzi Li

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

This paper proposes a novel method that incorporates empowerment when reasoning actions in reinforcement learning (RL), thereby achieving the flexibility of exploration-exploitation dilemma (EED). In previous methods, empowerment for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Taisuke Kobayashi

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a key driver of quality and safety in state-of-the-art large language models. Yet, a surprisingly simple and strong inference-time strategy is Best-of-N sampling that selects the best…

We propose Soft Preference Optimization (SPO), a method for aligning generative models, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), with human preferences, without the need for a reward model. SPO optimizes model outputs directly over a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Arsalan Sharifnassab , Saber Salehkaleybar , Sina Ghiassian , Surya Kanoria , Dale Schuurmans

LLM inference often generates a batch of candidates for a prompt and selects one via strategies like majority voting or Best-of- N (BoN). For difficult tasks, this single-shot selection often underperforms. Consequently, evaluations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Qiwei Di , Kaixuan Ji , Xuheng Li , Heyang Zhao , Quanquan Gu

Aligning diffusion models with user preferences has been a key challenge. Existing methods for aligning diffusion models either require retraining or are limited to differentiable reward functions. To address these limitations, we propose a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Po-Hung Yeh , Kuang-Huei Lee , Jun-Cheng Chen
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