Best-of-$\infty$ -- Asymptotic Performance of Test-Time LLM Ensembling

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Komiyama, Junpei, Oba, Daisuke, Oyamada, Masafumi
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Komiyama, Junpei
Oba, Daisuke
Oyamada, Masafumi
author_facet Komiyama, Junpei
Oba, Daisuke
Oyamada, Masafumi
contents 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 \boinflower. 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_21091
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Best-of-$\infty$ -- Asymptotic Performance of Test-Time LLM Ensembling
Komiyama, Junpei
Oba, Daisuke
Oyamada, Masafumi
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
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 \boinflower. 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.
title Best-of-$\infty$ -- Asymptotic Performance of Test-Time LLM Ensembling
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21091