The Calibration Floor: Format Repair Can Masquerade as Self-Correction at Small-to-Mid Scale
Accuracy changes after language-model self-revision are usually interpreted as changes in reasoning. We show this can fail at the answer-extraction boundary, and test the failure causally rather than only observationally. Across Qwen3.5 (0.8B-9B), Gemma-4-12B, and two frontier models via API (Tencent Hy3, Nvidia Nemotron-3-Ultra-550B) in 29 primary cells plus a frontier arm, we decompose the always-revise accuracy shift into a content margin (both answers parseable) and format-recovery/loss margins (parseability changes). On 12 cells with meaningful unparseable-answer rates, format effects exceed content effects (Wilcoxon p=1.7e-3). To test this causally, we force already-generated reason...
| Authors | Mingguang Chen, Bo Qu, Licheng Wang |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 5 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 5 August 2026 |
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