TreeBoN: Enhancing Inference-Time Alignment with Speculative Tree-Search and Best-of-N Sampling

ACL ARR 2025 May Submission5326 Authors

Abstract: 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.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Efficient/Low-Resource Methods for NLP

Research Area Keywords: Best-of-N, inference-time alignment, Tree Search, Token-level Reward, Large language model

Contribution Types: Approaches to low-resource settings, Approaches low compute settings-efficiency

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 5326