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arXiv AI By Guiv Farmanfarmaian

Selection, Recombination, or a Fresh Solve? A Candidate-Free Control for Single-Pass Test-Time Aggregation

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The paper investigates whether providing candidate solutions during test‑time aggregation improves or harms accuracy compared to a fresh solve that does not use any candidates. Using Qwen3‑4B on AIME‑2025 and HMMT‑2025, the authors find that conditioning on multiple correct candidates boosts accuracy (+0.290), while conditioning on an all‑wrong candidate pool reduces accuracy (−0.123); the effect for a single correct candidate remains unclear. The study also explores structured interventions and placebo controls, but the underlying mechanisms of these effects are not resolved.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

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