T1: Tool-integrated Verification for Test-time Compute Scaling in Small Language Models

Minki Kang*, Jongwon Jeong*, Jaewoong Cho

Abstract

Recent studies have demonstrated that test-time compute scaling effectively improves the performance of small language models (sLMs). However, prior research has mainly examined test-time compute scaling with an additional larger model as a verifier, leaving verification by sLMs underexplored. In this work, we investigate whether sLMs can reliably verify the output candidates under test-time scaling. We find that even with knowledge distillation from larger verifiers, sLMs struggle with verification tasks requiring memorization, such as numerical calculations and fact-checking. To address this limitation, we propose Tool-integrated verification (T1), a two-stage framework that first filters candidates with external tools and then uses an sLM for final verification, offloading memorization-heavy steps to tools such as a code interpreter. Within T1 we prove that offloading to external tools reduces the memorization burden on sLMs and improves test-time scaling performance. Experiments on the MATH benchmark demonstrate that, with T1, a Llama-3.2 1B model under test-time scaling outperforms the significantly larger Llama-3.1 8B model. Moreover, T1 improves the verification accuracy of both process reward models (PRMs) and critic models. Our findings highlight the potential of tool integration to substantially improve the verification abilities of sLMs.

ICLR 2026