/p/2026-10-19 · explainer
Paper explainer · 2610.21463 · Wang, Liu, Chen, Liu and Guo

Let the cheap model write it. The expensive one only signs it off.

A frontier model running an agent loop generates every step itself, and most of those steps are routine. Here a 4B model drafts the run — executing read-only tool calls as it goes, holding the first action that would change anything — and the 397B model reads the whole draft in one pass and returns only how long a prefix it accepts plus a replacement for the first bad step. On two customer-support benchmarks that matches the large model's score at 41% and 54% of its wall time and about a fifth of its calls. The accounting is the honest part: total compute goes up 30–87%, so this buys latency and memory traffic, not FLOPs.

01 · The problem

which benchmark

02 · The mechanism

walk the protocol

03 · The evidence

which benchmark

04 · Why I care

05 · Apply it

Your loop, your acceptance rate illustrative

Results

What the paper actually measured

What it does not show

In practice