Review Rarely Beats the Stronger Model: Separating Verification from Capability Transfer in LLM Pipelines
Qwen3-8B reviewing Llama-3.1-8B in math adds 33.2 points, yet Qwen3-8B alone is 6.4 points more accurate than the result. Reviewing another model's answer is usually judged by its gain over the generator. We show that this confuses verification, which adds accuracy beyond either model alone, with capability transfer, where a stronger reviewer supplies answers it could have given on its own. Measured against the stronger model alone, across 48 pairs of 12 open-weight models (3B to 72B) in math, knowledge, code and reasoning, review beats it in only 9 of 96 review directions, and does worse the larger the capability gap. The reason is that the reviewer mostly follows the generator, discardi...
| Authors | Yirui Zhang, Yash Raj Shrestha |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 11 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 11 October 2026 |
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