SCATR: a lightweight calibrated scorer finds the right LLM answer cheaply

pliang279 · x · 2026-09-30

SCATR (Simple Calibrated Test-Time Ranking), accepted to the COLM 2026 Efficient Reasoning Workshop, trains a lightweight scorer over an LLM's own representations using a small calibration set to rank candidate answers — no heavyweight verifier needed. As test-time compute and agentic systems generate more candidates, cheap answer selection becomes the bottleneck; empirically this simple recipe meaningfully improves best-of-n on coding and math.

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