Efficient Best-Of-N with Radial Consensus Score

Abstract

Solving complex problems with large language models (LLMs) often requires selecting the best answer from multiple candidate responses (best-of-$N$), yet identifying the most reliable one remains challenging, particularly when correctness does not align with majority agreement. Existing approaches based on voting or probability scoring rely on surface-level signals (e.g., frequency or token-level likelihood), often missing high-quality rare answers and ignoring the geometric structure of candidate representations, where correctness may emerge as semantic consistency rather than surface agreement. 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 Frechet mean (semantic center) of answer embeddings and ranking candidates by their radial distance to this center. This enables it to recover semantically coherent correct answers despite lexical fragmentation, even when no single surface form holds a plurality under exact-match voting. Importantly, RCS offers a flexible framework that supports multiple weighting schemes, enabling the integration of arbitrary signals, such as semantic agreement or model confidence, with the position of the center adapting accordingly. Extensive experiments across five open-weight models and various benchmarks demonstrate that RCS matches or outperforms strong baselines at every sampling budget, with the largest gains when correct answers are lexically fragmented. Moreover, RCS serves as an effective drop-in replacement for majority voting in multi-agent debate and remains effective in black-box scenarios. These results suggest that geometric consensus can serve as a scalable and reliable alternative to voting-based methods for answer selection. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/manhitv/RCS.