Confidence-Calibrated Inference Expansion for Evaluator-Guided Test-Time Reasoning
arXiv:2610.20836v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluator-guided reasoning presents a local control problem at every step: trust the current answer, return a fallback, or spend more inference. We formulate this choice as a compute-aware three-action controller, scoring terminal actions by predicted answer success and expansion by a rollout-based continuation-success surrogate, with compute cost priced explicitly. A local action-gap analysis characterizes when score errors can change a decision,…