Best-of-N: Inference-Time Compute for Small Language Models
Technical note TR-2026-02, superseding TR-2026-01. We measure what happens when a frozen language model is sampled 128 times perproblem and the result is selected rather than taken as given. On GSM8K,Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct goes from 45.3% at a single sample to 66.5% undermajority voting, with no weights modified. Covera...