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

Recent work on distillation transfers the capabilities of large models to smaller ones often by updating the latter's parameters, through teacher forcing, on-policy distillation, and related training-time methods. In this paper, we ask whether such transfer can instead occur at test time. We study strong-to-weak scaffolding: whether a stronger builder model can construct inference-time harnesses that help a weaker target model solve tasks more reliably without any parameter updates. Using four r

Related evidence

These records share source-supplied organisations, an exact publisher byline, automatic topics or regions. The reason is shown on every link; related does not mean supporting, agreeing with or verifying this record.

How to cite this record

ethics.ai (11 August 2026), “AI4AI at Test-Time: Strong-to-Weak Capability Transfer via Harnesses,” evidence record 18748, https://ethics.ai/record/18748 (originally published by HuggingFace Daily Papers).

Use and limitations

This page is a stable index and citation surface for a source record. ethics.ai did not author the underlying report and has not independently verified every claim. Automatic topics may be imperfect. For consequential use, quote and cite the original publisher.