Yifu Lu
2025
TreeBoN: Enhancing Inference-Time Alignment with Speculative Tree-Search and Best-of-N Sampling
Jiahao Qiu
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Yifu Lu
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Yifan Zeng
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Jiacheng Guo
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Jiayi Geng
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Chenhao Zhu
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Xinzhe Juan
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Ling Yang
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Huazheng Wang
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Kaixuan Huang
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Yue Wu
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Mengdi Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Inference-time alignment enhances the performance of large language models without requiring additional training or fine-tuning but presents challenges due to balancing computational efficiency with high-quality output. Best-of-N (BoN) sampling, as a simple yet powerful approach, generates multiple responses and selects the best one, achieving improved performance but with a high computational cost. We propose TreeBoN, a novel framework that integrates a speculative tree-search strategy into Best-of-N (BoN) Sampling. TreeBoN maintains a set of parent nodes, iteratively branching and pruning low-quality responses, thereby reducing computational overhead while maintaining high output quality. Our approach also leverages token-level rewards from Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to guide tree expansion and prune low-quality paths. We evaluate TreeBoN using AlpacaFarm, UltraFeedback, GSM8K, HH-RLHF, and TutorEval datasets, demonstrating consistent improvements. Specifically, TreeBoN achieves a 65% win rate at maximum lengths of 192 and 384 tokens, outperforming standard BoN with the same computational cost. Furthermore, TreeBoN achieves around a 60% win rate across longer responses, showcasing its scalability and alignment efficacy.
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Co-authors
- Jiayi Geng 1
- Jiacheng Guo 1
- Kaixuan Huang 1
- Xinzhe Juan 1
- Jiahao Qiu 1
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