Correct but Unselectable: The Hidden Interface Tax in Multi-Candidate Reasoning

Abstract

Small language models deployed under cost, latency, or privacy constraints cannot simply switch to larger models when reasoning fails. Multi-candidate generate-then-rerank offers a natural test-time scaling route. However, more candidates do not always yield higher accuracy. We identify a previously overlooked bottleneck between generation and selection: a correct answer may appear in the candidate pool yet fail to be selected because it is incomplete, unparseable, or misaligned with the answer mode the fixed selector expects. We term this loss the hidden interface tax and formalize a coverage-conversion decomposition that distinguishes raw oracle coverage from selectable coverage, the subset of problems where a correct candidate can actually be consumed by the selector. We propose Compatibility-Aware Candidate Construction (CACC), an interface layer between the candidate source and the fixed selector that repairs fragments, aligns answer modes, and removes selector-confusing noise without retraining either component. On numeric reasoning (GSM8K, competition_math), CACC raises both oracle coverage and final accuracy. On GPQA Diamond, CACC alone improves final accuracy from 5.6% to 19.2% (+13.6 pp); combined with proposer-side strengthening it reaches 25.8% (+20.2 pp). On MMLU-Pro, CACC exposes a coverage-conversion gap: answer-mode-compatible construction raises oracle coverage, but final accuracy decreases by 0.85 pp under the original selector; adding proposer-side strengthening improves final accuracy.