Best-of-$\infty$ -- Asymptotic Performance of Test-Time Compute

We study best-of-$N$ for large language models (LLMs) where the selection is based on majority voting. In particular, we analyze the limit $N \to \infty$, which we denote as Best-of-$\infty$. 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 $N$ 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.

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Publication Details

Journal
ArXiv.org
Published
2025-09-25
Primary Topic
Medical Coding and Health Information
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article
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article

Best-of-$\infty$ -- Asymptotic Performance of Test-Time Compute

ArXiv.org
Medical Coding and Health Information
article

Best-of-$\infty$ -- Asymptotic Performance of Test-Time Compute

article en

Abstract

We study best-of-$N$ for large language models (LLMs) where the selection is based on majority voting. In particular, we analyze the limit $N \to \infty$, which we denote as Best-of-$\infty$. 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 $N$ 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.

ArXiv.org
RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project (JP)
Openalex Percentile: Top 41%
Medical Coding and Health Information
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