CarBoN: Calibrated Best-of-N Sampling Improves Test-time Reasoning

📄 Abstract

Abstract: Allocating more computation during inference time (test-time scaling) improves language model performance, especially for reasoning tasks. However, popular methods like Best-of-$N$ sampling often show diminishing returns as $N$ increases. To address this inefficiency, we introduce a general test-time calibration framework that adaptively modifies the model toward high-reward reasoning paths, with theoretical guarantees of improving the lower bound of expected reward under finite sampling, all without large language model (LLM) retraining. Within this framework, we propose CarBoN (Calibrated Best-of-$N$), a two-phase method that first explores the solution space and then learns a calibration of the logits via an input-specific temperature $T$ and additive shift vector $\delta$, guiding generation toward more reliable reasoning. Experiments on MATH-500 and AIME-2024 show that CarBoN improves efficiency, with up to $4\times$ fewer rollouts to reach the same accuracy, while often achieving higher accuracy under fixed budgets. We also analyze the complementary roles of $T$ and $\delta$ in balancing output diversity and correctness, and demonstrate that the framework also generalizes to step-level sampling strategies such as beam search. For more information, please refer to our project page at huggingface.co/spaces/TrustSafeAI/Test-Time-Calibration.