# VStress: Correlation-Aware Auditing and Adaptive Budget Allocation for Repeated Verifiers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36958 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36958/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

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- [Let's Verify Step by Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20050/) (2023)
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- [Planning with Diffusion for Flexible Behavior Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09991/) (2022)
- [FrugalGPT: How to Use Large Language Models While Reducing Cost and Improving Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05176/) (2023)
- [RouteLLM: Learning to Route LLMs with Preference Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18665/) (2024)
- [RewardBench: Evaluating Reward Models for Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13787/) (2024)
- [Policy Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06295/) (2015)
- [SelectiveNet: A Deep Neural Network with an Integrated Reject Option](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09192/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Repeated verifier calls are useful only when they contribute conditional information. We introduce VStress, an auditable replay contract, and VStress-CA, a correlation-aware allocation policy that estimates the conditional marginal information of an unqueried verifier on a sealed calibration split, discounts uncertainty, normalizes by call cost, and stops or abstains when the next call is not informative. The controller freezes its decision and cost ledger before joining the clean oracle; a dependence-shift alarm disables channel preference and falls back to exact-stop. The controlled audit gives the mechanism boundary: at 35% symmetric corruption, majority-5 improves balanced accuracy from 0.6578 to 0.7739, whereas at 65% it loses 0.1226 points. In the matched fixed-budget comparison, breadth, redundancy, and adaptive allocation obtain balanced accuracies 0.6048, 0.6375, and 0.6538, with 3.4216 calls per item and an RLVR score of 0.6417 for VStress-CA. Dependence diagnostics also increase from same-model repeats to cross-family channels, with conditional marginal gains of 0.0126, 0.0462, and 0.0913. These measurements turn correlation from a post-hoc warning into an auditable allocation decision.