MSA-CITE: A Co-Adapted LoRA Specialist Ecology for Fixed-Budget Small-Model Inference

Abstract

Compact language models are typically deployed by retaining a single post-training checkpoint and sampling it repeatedly. In this work, we challenge this practice by treating multiple discarded checkpoints as composable assets for deployment. Starting from a single Qwen3-4B backbone, we preserve four frozen LoRA branches, each derived from a different post-training trajectory. stead of drawing four generations from one branch, we allocate a fixed four-generation budget by sampling one completion from each branch. Our method, Multi-path Specialist Adaptation with Calibrated Inference-Time Evidence (MSA-CITE), processes the resulting portfolio by grouping terminal answers into equivalence classes, scoring each class via summed calibration-derived source priors, and selecting a representative under deterministic tie-breaking rules. The readout stage does not learn from evaluation results, nor does it introduce additional generations, verifiers, or reranking steps. On 200 held-out mathematics items, the four-path portfolio achieves 65.5% accuracy, compared with 62.0% for the strongest single-branch baseline. On a 100-item subject-disjoint shift, it attains 42.0% versus 40.0%. Under in-distribution conditions, the improvements over homogeneous SFT and Online-OPD repetition are robust; results against the strongest baseline and under shifted conditions are not conclusive. Our findings offer a narrow but concrete contribution: post-training branches, even without co-training, can be collectively beneficial for deployment.