Moving the Mean Toward the Known Good, Not Beyond It: What Inference-Time Interventions and Weight Consolidation Buy in Open-Ended Generation

What does a generation loop gain from learning on its own verified successes? In cycles of generate, verify, select and LoRA-consolidate on online bin packing, training on value-filtered candidates shifts what the model writes on held-out variants toward value (-1.7 points of excess, p=0.008; -3.1 a