Scaffold or scale?

In none of the 10 comparisons did an architecture on a smaller model score reliably above a single agent on the next model up.

Every number is a mean over tasks, not runs: whole tasks are resampled (a cluster bootstrap of 10,000 replicates), so a task's repeats stay together and the 95% intervals are as wide as the tasks make them. Architectures are compared in pairs on the cells both ran, the same task and the same repeat: score differences are differences of means, cost and latency are geometric-mean ratios, and for them “better” means cheaper or faster. Each verdict comes from tests, not from whether two intervals overlap, and is Holm-adjusted within its family (one kind of contrast on one metric, across every model) to hold the chance of any false call in a family at 5%; so a verdict can read “not separable” while the unadjusted interval excludes zero. “Equivalent” means two one-sided tests show the difference within ±0.05 of score (×/÷1.1 for cost and latency). With fewer than 5 tasks no verdict is drawn, and where every task moved by the same amount there is no interval, which the table says instead of printing a zero-width one.