Title: Best-of-Majority: Minimax-Optimal Strategy for Pass@k Inference Scaling
Primary area: learning theory
Keywords: Inference-time scaling, Pass@k

Abstract: LLM inference often generates a batch of candidates for a prompt and selects one via strategies like majority voting or Best-of-
N (BoN). For difficult tasks, this single-shot selection often underperforms. Consequently, evaluations commonly report Pass@$k$: the agent may submit up to $k$ responses, and only the best of them is used when computing regret. Motivated by this, we study inference scaling in the more general Pass@$k$ inference setting, and prove that neither majority voting nor BoN exhibits the desirable scaling with $k$ and the sampling budget $N$. Combining the advantages of majority voting and BoN, we propose a new inference strategy called Best-of-Majority (BoM), with a pivotal step that restricts the candidates to the responses with high frequency in the $N$ samples before selecting the top-$k$ rewards. We prove that when the sampling budget is $N=\tilde\Omega(C^\*)$, the regret of BoM is $O(\epsilon_{\mathrm{opt}}+\sqrt{\epsilon_{\mathrm{RM}}^2C^\*/k})$, where $C^*$ is the coverage coefficient, $\epsilon_{\mathrm{RM}}$ is the estimation error of the reward model, and $\epsilon_{\mathrm{opt}}$ is the estimation error of reward at the optimal response. We further establish a matching lower bound, certifying that our algorithm is minimax optimal. Beyond optimality, BoM has a key advantage: unlike majority voting and BoN, its performance does not degrade when increasing $N$. Experimental results of inference on math problems show BoM outperforming both majority voting and BoN.