Selection, Recombination, or a Fresh Solve? A Candidate-Free Control for Single-Pass Test-Time Aggregation
When every candidate is wrong, correct-candidate selection is unavailable, yet the aggregation call can still solve the problem afresh. A correct aggregate answer may therefore reflect recombination, fresh solving, or both. For efficient test-time reasoning, the relevant question is whether candidate context adds value beyond the additional generation pass. We introduce the missing candidate-free control under the same maximum output-token allowance and stratify by the number of correct candidates. Across AIME-2025 and HMMT-2025 with Qwen3-4B, candidate conditioning improves accuracy when multiple candidates are correct ($Δ_{\mathrm{cand}}$(c2+) = +0.290), lowers accuracy when every candi...
| Authors | Guiv Farmanfarmaian |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 18 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 August 2026 |
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