On Turn-Level Best-of-N Sampling for Scaling LLM Agents
Jalaj Bhandari, Dhawal Gupta, Hongli Zhan, Zhenting Wang, Varad Pimpalkhute, Zhengzhong Liu, Eric Xing, Rupesh Srivastava
AI 速览：作者在长程终端任务上评估轮级best-of-N采样：每轮由生成器产生N个候选动作、选择器挑选其一执行，并报告准确率与重复尝试一致性有所提升。
In this work, we evaluate a simple inference-time scaling approach based on \textit{turn-level best-of-N sampling} (\method) for large language model (LLM) agents on complex, long-horizon tasks. We instantiate this using a \textit{generator-selector} framework with two LLMs; at each turn, a \emph{generator} model generates $N$ candidate actions and a \emph{selector} model selects one of them, which is then executed in the environment. This paper is closely related to the work of \cite{zainullina2025guided} who used critic models for guided search at inference time. Different from their work, we evaluate if off-the-shelf, open-weight LLMs can be effective at comparing different candidate actions directly. Experiments on long-horizon terminal tasks show that \method can lead to significant performance improvements, both in terms of accuracy (5--10\%) and consistency across repeated attempts. Analysis of agent trajectories reveal a shift in agent behaviour towards desirable patterns such as reduction in number of attempts to solve the task, improved task instruction following, debugging and testing.
Hamza Iqbal, Dan Cher, Eric Xing, Pranavi Kolouju, Abby Stylianou, Robert Pless, Nathan Jacobs
Finding specific objects, structures, and spatial patterns supports critical work in agriculture, infrastructure planning, environmental monitoring, and disaster response. These features, however, are often dispersed across very large regions and span dramatically different spatial scales, which defines a search space that is costly to embed, maintain, and search naively. We introduce GeoDIVE, a model that treats a multiresolution satellite image gallery as a forest and uses best-first traversal to determine which tiles to encode. At each visited node, a lightweight model then predicts an optimistic estimate of the best query similarity hidden among its descendants using the query and subtree representations. In evaluations with image and open-vocabulary text queries, GeoDIVE matches exhaustive search at 10% of the encoding cost for image queries and leads all tested baselines at every budget in both modalities. To support future evaluation of multiscale geospatial search, we also release object-level image and text queries for Git-10M, constructed from Microsoft building footprints and OpenStreetMap polygons with VLM-generated captions. Source code and models will be made publicly available.