Answer Delivery Under a Shared Token Budget: An Audited Study of Stopping and Finalization
An inference budget is useful only when the system delivers an answer within it. We study a fixed-budget policy combining first-valid-box stopping with a charged finalization cue. On 100 fresh, independently audited GSM8K test questions per model, it improves delivered endpoint accuracy over first-box stopping by 8.0 percentage points for Qwen3-4B-Thinking-2507 and 7.0 for DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B. A prelocked repeat on the same questions gives 7.0 and 10.0 points; neither seed shows a gross harm relative to first-box stopping. The point estimates of incremental physical-slot savings are below one percent. A finalization-only ablation separates cue recovery from stopping, and a fixed ...
| Authors | Yupeng Chang, Linyuan Gao, Zhiyuan Li et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 19 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 19 October 2026 |
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