Predicting Inference-Time Scaling Gains from Labeled Validation-Set Output Statistics

In three linesMethod to predict best-of-N inference scaling gains without running the full procedure. Ridge predictor identifies 3 stable features (prompt-level agreement spread, label-assisted first-correct-sample position, completion-length variance) plus entropy, reaching Spearman ρ=0.90 correlation with actual gains across model families and math/reasoning tasks.

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