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AI4AI at Test-Time: Strong-to-Weak Capability Transfer via Harnesses

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Merged summary

TL;DR - Strong models can build inference-time harnesses that transfer capabilities to weaker models without parameter updates. Across four Theory-of-Mind benchmarks, these harnesses nearly doubled average target-model performance from 0.49 to 0.91.

  • Harnesses were iteratively refined using 5% of benchmark data, then evaluated on the full test set.
  • Gains primarily came from deterministic code, benchmark-specific routing, and strict output formatting—not deeper reasoning or broader sampling.
  • More builder-model reasoning consistently improved harness quality.
  • Weaker target models benefited most, while platform effects were comparatively modest.

Sources (1)

AI4AI at Test-Time: Strong-to-Weak Capability Transfer via Harnesses

arXiv cs.LG Cheng Qian, Wenting Zhao, Liangwei Yang, Heng Wang, Jielin Qiu, Heng Ji, Silvio Savarese, Huan Wang, Shelby Heinecke 2026-08-12 arXiv:2608.12307
Public signals Hugging Face upvotes 115 · Semantic Scholar citations 1 · Semantic Scholar influential citations 0
Providers: Hugging Face · Upvotes 115 OpenAlex · N/A Publisher · N/A Semantic Scholar · Citations 1 · Influential citations 0 X · N/A Fetched 2026-09-12 14:28:15.476157 UTC

TL;DR - Strong models can build inference-time harnesses that transfer capabilities to weaker models without parameter updates. Across four Theory-of-Mind benchmarks, these harnesses nearly doubled average target-model performance from 0.49 to 0.91.

  • Harnesses were iteratively refined using 5% of benchmark data, then evaluated on the full test set.
  • Gains primarily came from deterministic code, benchmark-specific routing, and strict output formatting—not deeper reasoning or broader sampling.
  • More builder-model reasoning consistently improved harness quality.
  • Weaker target models benefited most, while platform effects were comparatively modest.
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