Understanding the Benefits of Scaffolds through Computational Separations
arXiv:2610.27157v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inference-time harnesses, i.e., external procedures that call a model many times and keep state across calls, can substantially improve model capabilities. In this paper, we investigate the benefits of using such harnesses and the extent to which these benefits can be internalized through training. More precisely, we conceptualize a harness $\mathcal{A}$ as an arbitrary wrapper around a base model $M$ and attempt to distill a student model from…