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LLM reasoning / chain-of-thought

Best-of-N

Superseded baseline#8 of 772 most-superseded

Superseded — cited as a baseline and beaten by newer methods

3 papers critique it · 4 beat it on benchmarks

What papers say

Verbatim critique sentences, each from a paper that cites Best-of-N as a baseline.

the far simpler method of majority voting wang2023selfconsistency, which completely ignores the expensive PRM and relies solely on the consensus of the LLM's own generations, can outperform PRM-guided BoN.
— Optimal Aggregation of LLM and PRM Signals for Efficient Test-Time Scaling
“restricting PRM evaluation to complete CoTs misses opportunities for dynamic guidance”
— Limits of PRM-Guided Tree Search for Mathematical Reasoning with LLMs
“In all of these methods the guidance signal---critique, scoring model, abstraction prompt---is produced by an untrained, prompted LLM.”
— Co-ReAct: Rubrics as Step-Level Collaborators for ReAct Agents

Beaten on benchmarks

Head-to-head results where a newer method reports beating Best-of-N. Values are copied from the source paper's tables — verify against the cited paper.

What to use instead

Recent methods in the same sub-problem, not yet superseded in the knowledge base — arXiv benchmark leaders, not vetted production recommendations.