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Fast Best-of-N Decoding via Speculative Rejection

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arxiv 2410.20290 v2 pith:B4GTO36L submitted 2024-10-26 cs.CL

classification cs.CL
keywords alignmentbest-of-npost-trainingcalledinference-timellmsmodelresponses
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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The safe and effective deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) involves a critical step called alignment, which ensures that the model's responses are in accordance with human preferences. Prevalent alignment techniques, such as DPO, PPO and their variants, align LLMs by changing the pre-trained model weights during a phase called post-training. While predominant, these post-training methods add substantial complexity before LLMs can be deployed. Inference-time alignment methods avoid the complex post-training step and instead bias the generation towards responses that are aligned with human preferences. The best-known inference-time alignment method, called Best-of-N, is as effective as the state-of-the-art post-training procedures. Unfortunately, Best-of-N requires vastly more resources at inference time than standard decoding strategies, which makes it computationally not viable. In this work, we introduce Speculative Rejection, a computationally-viable inference-time alignment algorithm. It generates high-scoring responses according to a given reward model, like Best-of-N does, while being between 16 to 32 times more computationally efficient.

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Cited by 5 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Best-of-N through the Smoothing Lens: KL Divergence and Regret Analysis

    stat.ML 2025-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Smoothed Best-of-N has finite-sample KL and regret bounds under imperfect reward models, and tuning its temperature can make its regret bound beat hard Best-of-N in the overoptimization regime.

  2. How Far Are We from Optimal Reasoning Efficiency?

    cs.CL 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    The authors define a reasoning efficiency frontier and a gap metric (REG), then train models with REO-RL to shrink the gap by at least 50% with only small accuracy losses.

  3. What makes Reasoning Models Different? Follow the Reasoning Leader for Efficient Decoding

    cs.CL 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    FoReaL-Decoding lets a strong reasoning model generate the first few tokens of each sentence and a weaker model complete the sentence, cutting theoretical FLOPs by 30-55% while retaining 86-100% of accuracy on four ma...

  4. PREMISE: Scalable and Strategic Prompt Optimization for Efficient Mathematical Reasoning in Large Models

    cs.CL 2025-06 reject novelty 4.0 of 10

    The paper reports that a concise optimized prompt reduces reasoning tokens by up to 87.5% while roughly preserving accuracy on GSM8K, SVAMP, and MATH-500.

  5. Wait, We Don't Need to "Wait"! Removing Thinking Tokens Improves Reasoning Efficiency

    cs.CL 2025-06 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    Suppressing "Wait"-like reflection tokens at decode time reduces reasoning token counts by 27-51% across five R1-style model families, with mixed accuracy effects.

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