Tail Competition Explains Scaling in Best-of-N Sampling for Verifiable Problems

Best-of-N sampling is a simple inference-time scaling strategy for large language models, yet its behavior under incomplete reward models remains poorly understood. We study Best-of-N as a competition between the extreme reward tails of correct and incorrect responses. This view shows that success depends not only on the probability of sampling a correct response, but also on whether correct responses dominate incorrect ones in the upper tail. Using extreme value theory, we characterize three asymptotic regimes: correct-tail-dominant, incorrect-tail-dominant, and critical explaining both monotonic gains and reward-hacking-induced degradation. We further derive finite-sample scaling laws f...

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