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arXiv · 2610.26384

Answer Delivery Under a Shared Token Budget: An Audited Study of Stopping and Finalization

Yupeng Chang·Linyuan Gao·Zhiyuan Li·Yuan Wu·Yi Chang
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Abstract

An inference budget is useful only when the system delivers an answer within it. We study a fixed-budget policy combining first-valid-box stopping with a charged finalization cue. On 100 fresh, independently audited GSM8K test questions per model, it improves delivered endpoint accuracy over first-box stopping by 8.0 percentage points for Qwen3-4B-Thinking-2507 and 7.0 for DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B. A prelocked repeat on the same questions gives 7.0 and 10.0 points; neither seed shows a gross harm relative to first-box stopping. The point estimates of incremental physical-slot savings are below one percent. A finalization-only ablation separates cue recovery from stopping, and a fixed scalar reader tests extraction as an alternative explanation. The cue is prior art; the contribution is a component and readout analysis with charged injections and verified paths. Results cover two checkpoints, one task, one prompt family, and two fixed seed conditions.

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Yupeng Chang, Linyuan Gao, Zhiyuan Li, Yuan Wu, Yi Chang. 2026-10-19. Answer Delivery Under a Shared Token Budget: An Audited Study of Stopping and Finalization. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26384

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