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

Main:13 Pages
13 Figures
Bibliography:6 Pages
8 Tables
Appendix:16 Pages
Abstract

We study best-of-NN for large language models (LLMs) where the selection is based on majority voting. In particular, we analyze the limit NN \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 NN 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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