Weak-to-Strong Elicitation via Mismatched Wrong Drafts

TL;DR

The paper demonstrates that injecting mismatched, weaker model drafts into a stronger learner's training process can significantly improve performance on mathematical problem-solving benchmarks, outperforming standard fine-tuning methods.

Contribution

It introduces a novel off-policy training approach using mismatched drafts from a smaller model to enhance a stronger learner's capabilities in math problem-solving tasks.

Findings

Mismatched wrong drafts improve MATH-500 pass@1 by +1.62pp over matched variants.

Mismatched wrong drafts outperform other variants on out-of-distribution AIME 2025/2026.

The method achieves 71.98% on MATH-500, surpassing previous state-of-the-art models.

Abstract

We consider whether off-policy experience from a smaller, weaker model can elicit capability in a stronger learner that on-policy RL fine-tuning (e.g., GRPO) does not reach. We find that injecting mathematically wrong drafts from a smaller but more domain-trained model -- mismatched to the current problem -- into a stronger learner's GRPO context consistently outperforms standard on-policy GRPO on held-out MATH-500 and out-of-distribution AIME 2025/2026. Concretely, we use Mathstral-7B as the learner, Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B as the draft model, 8.8K Level 3--5 MATH problems (with MATH-500 held out), and train with Dr. GRPO. Mismatch is an active ingredient: shuffling drafts to mismatched problems while holding everything else constant yields $+1.62$pp on MATH-500 (greedy pass@1) over the matched-wrong variant ($n=10$ seeds, $p=0.0015$, Welch's $t$). In fact, the mismatched-wrong variant leads all other variants we tested on MATH-500 across both greedy pass@1 and sampling pass@$k$. On out-of-distribution AIME 2025 and 2026, the mismatched-wrong variant uniquely lifts pass@$k$ above both Mathstral-7B (in its native [INST] format) and the Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B draft model at every sample budget from $k=1$ to $k=1024$ across 2 seeds ($+14.2$pp on 2025 and $+9.0$pp on 2026 at pass@1024 over Mathstral-7B), and at pass@1024 also leads no-draft, matched-wrong, and mismatched-correct variants on both years. All variants use the same prompt with no draft injection at test time. The recipe -- trained on a single GPU with no SFT, no reward models, no synthesized data, and no produce-critique-revise inner loop -- reaches 71.98% MATH-500 on Mathstral-7B-v0.1, the highest published result on this model to our knowledge, surpassing the heavier WizardMath pipeline at 70.9% on full MATH (SFT + PPO with process/instruction reward models).