用几何距离选最优答案,比投票更准更稳。
Beyond Majority Voting: Efficient Best-Of-N with Radial Consensus Score
- 基于答案嵌入的几何中心,按距离排序选出最佳回复。
- 在7个数据集上优于主流方法,采样越多优势越明显。
- 无需训练,适配黑箱模型,适合多智能体辩论场景。
大语言模型常生成多个候选回答,但选择最可靠结果仍具挑战,尤其当正确性与表面多数意见不一致时。现有方法如自一致性依赖离散投票,概率方法往往忽略答案间关系或低估高质量但低频回复,且未充分利用答案表示的几何结构。为此,本文提出径向共识得分(RCS),一种简单、高效、无需训练的最佳N选一方法。RCS通过加权弗雷切特均值(语义中心)建模语义共识,并根据候选答案到该中心的径向距离进行排序。重要的是,RCS支持多种加权策略,包括均匀、频率和概率方案,可灵活融合一致信号与模型置信度,且完全适用于黑箱场景。在覆盖短文本问答与长文本推理的7个基准、5个开源模型上的实验表明,RCS变体持续优于强基线,采样预算越大优势越显著。RCS还可作为多智能体辩论中多数投票的有效替代,展现出强鲁棒性。总体而言,这些结果凸显几何共识作为可扩展、普适的可靠答案选择原则,超越了传统多数投票,实现更表达性与鲁棒的模型推理聚合。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large language models (LLMs) frequently generate multiple candidate responses for a given prompt, yet selecting the most reliable one remains challenging, especially when correctness diverges from surface-level majority agreement. Existing approaches, such as self-consistency, rely on discrete voting, while probability-based methods often fail to capture relationships among candidate answers or tend to underweight high-quality but less frequent responses, and do not fully leverage the geometric structure of answer representations. To address these limitations, we introduce Radial Consensus Score (RCS), a simple, efficient, and training-free method for best-of-N selection. RCS models semantic consensus by computing a weighted Fréchet mean (semantic center) of answer embeddings and ranking candidates by their radial distance to this center. Importantly, RCS provides a general framework that supports multiple weighting schemes, including uniform, frequency-based, and probability-based variants, enabling flexible integration of agreement signals and model confidence while remaining fully applicable in black-box settings. Extensive experiments across seven benchmarks covering short-form QA and long-form reasoning tasks, and five open-weight models, demonstrate that RCS variants consistently outperform strong baselines, with gains becoming more pronounced as the sampling budget increases. RCS also serves as an effective drop-in replacement for majority voting in multi-agent debate and exhibits strong robustness in black-box scenarios. Overall, these results highlight geometric consensus as a scalable and broadly applicable principle for reliable answer selection, extending beyond majority voting to more expressive and robust aggregation in LLM inference.
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