MetaStone-S1: How 32B Beats OpenAI o3-mini with Draft Paper Strategy

From Quick Guesses to Thoughtful Drafts: How MetaStone-S1 Makes a 32 B Model Rival OpenAI o3-mini 1. Why Do Large Language Models Need Draft Paper? Imagine you are taking a tough math final. If you must write the final answer in one shot, you will probably lose points. Give yourself scratch paper, let yourself jot down three different approaches, and then hand in the cleanest version—your score jumps. Large language models (LLMs) face the same problem. Traditional models generate one answer and stop. A newer idea called Test-Time Scaling (TTS) lets the model create many “draft solutions” at inference time, …