A small expert can teach a bigger model: ScienceRSI lifts a 27B model to 94.0% across seven benchmarks
ScienceRSI splits scientific capability into specialization, verification, transfer and reuse, so an expert model contributes feedback only where it is genuinely better on the same scientific requirement. In the 4B-to-4B setting, scientific-reasoning average reached 55.0%, 2.0 points above GRPO; transferring from Qwen3-8B experts to a Qwen3.5-27B target raised the equal-weight average over seven benchmarks from 87.3% to 94.0%. Removing expert-contribution verification dropped the same 4B student's scientific-reasoning average from 55.0% to 50.6%.