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    "story_id": "mp-2026-10-18-016",
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    "headline": "Model Disagreement Can Route the Hard Cases",
    "slug": "model-disagreement-can-route-the-hard-cases",
    "dek": "Weak-to-strong escalation works without ground-truth labels by comparing multiple local answers.",
    "summary": "Weak-to-strong escalation works without ground-truth labels by comparing multiple local answers.",
    "body_text": "A small model often cannot know when it is wrong, and collecting correctness labels for open-ended agent work is expensive. This routing method compares multiple weak-model responses and estimates disagreement against a stronger model as a proxy for when escalation is worthwhile. Across agentic and single-turn tasks, it balanced cost and accuracy without ground-truth supervision, sometimes outperforming routers trained directly on correctness labels. Its approximation improves as the stronger model better tracks the true answer distribution.",
    "why_it_matters": "Weak-to-strong escalation works without ground-truth labels by comparing multiple local answers.",
    "limitations": [
      "A small model often cannot know when it is wrong, and collecting correctness labels for open-ended agent work is expensive."
    ],
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    "first_published_at": "2026-10-18T09:00:00.000-04:00",
    "modified_at": "2026-10-18T09:00:00.000-04:00",
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        "text": "Weak-to-strong escalation works without ground-truth labels by comparing multiple local answers.",
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        "qualification": "A small model often cannot know when it is wrong, and collecting correctness labels for open-ended agent work is expensive."
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    "tags": [
      "model routing",
      "edge AI",
      "cost"
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  "sources": [
    {
      "source_id": "source-2026-10-18-018",
      "title": "arXiv preprint 2610.22245, original v1",
      "publisher": "arXiv",
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      "published_at": "2026-10-15T13:19:57.000-04:00",
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  "publisher": {
    "name": "The Machine Press",
    "url": "https://themachinepress.com",
    "description": "A daily newspaper for the age of artificial intelligence."
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  "cite_this_report": {
    "title": "Model Disagreement Can Route the Hard Cases",
    "publisher": "The Machine Press",
    "published_at": "2026-10-18T09:00:00.000-04:00",
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