Pre-trained models with a light inference harness cover more solutions on agentic tasks, while post-training imposes a measurable sharpening tax
The work finds that pre-trained LLMs with a light inference harness, despite far lower single-shot accuracy (pass@1), often surpass their post-trained counterparts in solution coverage (pass@K) given sufficient test-time budget; it proposes the Sharpening Tax metric to quantify post-training's loss in test-time scalability, shows across 14 base/post-trained model pairs from four families and three agentic benchmarks (42 cases) that the tax is prevalent, estimable from a few rollouts, and correlates with other metrics, and presents PTGS, a difficulty-adaptive Bayesian sampler that reduces the tax.