{"paper":{"title":"Is Best-of-N the Best of Them? Coverage, Scaling, and Optimality in Inference-Time Alignment","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.LG","stat.ML"],"primary_cat":"cs.AI","authors_text":"Adam Block, Akshay Krishnamurthy, Audrey Huang, Dylan J. Foster, Nan Jiang, Qinghua Liu","submitted_at":"2025-03-27T18:00:08Z","abstract_excerpt":"Inference-time computation offers a powerful axis for scaling the performance of language models. However, naively increasing computation in techniques like Best-of-N sampling can lead to performance degradation due to reward hacking. Toward a theoretical understanding of how to best leverage additional computation, we focus on inference-time alignment, which we formalize as the problem of improving the quality of responses drawn from a pre-trained policy, given a prompt of interest and access to an imperfect reward model. We analyze the performance of inference-time alignment algorithms in te"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2503.21878","kind":"arxiv","version":2},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2503.21878/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}