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Obtaining high-quality generations in modern LLMs has largely been framed as a selection problem: identifying a single winning generation from a diverse pool of N samples, the Best-of-N (BoN). Yet, this approach is inherently zero-sum,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Ammar Khairi , Daniel D'souza , Marzieh Fadaee , Julia Kreutzer

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise for equation discovery, yet their outputs are highly sensitive to prompt phrasing, a phenomenon we term instruction brittleness. Static prompts cannot adapt to the evolving state of a multi-step…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-05 Junqi Qu , Yan Zhang , Shangqian Gao , Shibo Li

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

Alignment has greatly improved large language models (LLMs)' output quality at the cost of diversity, yielding highly similar outputs across generations. We propose Base-Aligned Model Collaboration (BACo), an inference-time token-level…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Yichen Wang , Chenghao Yang , Tenghao Huang , Muhao Chen , Jonathan May , Mina Lee

While recent advancements in aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with recommendation tasks have shown great potential and promising performance overall, these aligned recommendation LLMs still face challenges in complex scenarios. This is…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Yi Fang , Wenjie Wang , Yang Zhang , Fengbin Zhu , Qifan Wang , Fuli Feng , Xiangnan He

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) often suffer from overconfidence during inference, particularly when adapted to downstream domain-specific tasks with limited data. Previous work addresses this issue by employing approximate Bayesian estimation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Yibin Wang , Haizhou Shi , Ligong Han , Dimitris Metaxas , Hao Wang

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…

Traditional methods for system discovery frequently struggle with efficient data usage and uncertainty quantification. Identifying the governing equations of complex dynamical systems from data presents a significant challenge in scientific…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-14 Cindy Xiangrui Kong , Haoyang Zheng , Guang Lin

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) 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

Recently, competition in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) has intensified among major technological companies, resulting in the continuous release of new large-language models (LLMs) that exhibit improved language understanding and…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Sinnyum Choi , Woong Kim

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

Inference scaling helps LLMs solve complex reasoning problems through extended runtime computation. On top of long chain-of-thought (long-CoT) models, purely inference-time techniques such as best-of-N (BoN) sampling, majority voting, or…

Recently, sequential recommendation has been adapted to the LLM paradigm to enjoy the power of LLMs. LLM-based methods usually formulate recommendation information into natural language and the model is trained to predict the next item in…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-02-16 Hanbing Wang , Xiaorui Liu , Wenqi Fan , Xiangyu Zhao , Venkataramana Kini , Devendra Yadav , Fei Wang , Zhen Wen , Jiliang Tang , Hui Liu

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

LLM alignment remains a critical challenge. Inference-time methods provide a flexible alternative to fine-tuning, but their uniform computational effort often yields suboptimal alignment. We hypothesize that for many alignment tasks, the…

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

The rapid advancement of AI technologies and their accelerated adoption in software development necessitates a systematic evaluation of their environmental impact alongside functional correctness. While prior studies have examined…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Mohammadjavad Mehditabar , Saurabhsingh Rajput , Antonio Mastropaolo , Tushar Sharma