Reasoning-enabled model derivatives must turn intermediate deliberation into a usable answer within a deployment budget. We study that transition in an Ornith checkpoint adapted to multi-camera driving question answering with verifiable rewards. Paired archived outputs show that, on a selected 400-question development screen with a 256-token cap, GRPO increases answer extraction from 78.25% to 90.25% and accuracy from 55.50% to 63.75%. Of 39 wrong-to-correct transitions, 33 begin with an unextractable base response. The base's 87 unextractable responses all reach the token cap. Checkpoint-verified reconstruction on those same questions gives a much smaller first-pass accuracy gain at 512 tokens: +0.75 percentage points, versus +8.25 at 256. A later answer-cued continuation is analyzed separately; it helps the base more and narrows the adapter difference. On the full 2,511-question development set, this recovery-enabled pipeline reduces mean generated tokens from 108.6 to 47.1, while the paired accuracy interval includes zero gain. We frame these findings as adaptation of answer delivery under finite budgets, with explicit selection and provenance limits. Ornith's self-scaffolding lineage and newer reasoning-enabled derivatives such as Bonsai motivate the problem, but our measured results concern Ornith alone and do not establish a shared architectural mechanism or cross-model transfer.
Multi-camera driving question answering provides a discrete test of vision-language models, but post-training gains can reflect changed selected answers or improved answer extraction. We investigate this distinction within the Gemma model family using archived, task-linked WaymoQA evaluations. A zero-shot diagnostic on 5,519 test questions spans effective-small, mixture-of-experts, unified, and dense checkpoints, with serving differences disclosed rather than interpreted as architecture effects. The strongest controlled evidence is a matched-harness Gemma-4-12B base/GRPO pair: accuracy rises from 73.78% to 75.43%, a gain of 1.65 percentage points with a scene-cluster bootstrap interval of [+0.84, +2.41]. There are 215 improvements and 124 regressions; 213 improvements start from an extractable but incorrect base answer, and only two recover previously unextractable responses. Crossing correctness with extraction state shows why correct noncompliant outputs cannot be counted as prediction errors. Category counts reveal a critical safety asymmetry: routine perception gains (+5.93 pp) mask a regression in safety-critical hazard prediction (-1.82 pp), demonstrating that unweighted outcome rewards can trade off rare edge cases for aggregate accuracy. Reward saturation describes sampled training dynamics rather than an architectural ceiling. A separate archived Gemma-31B thinking comparison yields no detected average improvement, with uncertainty that does not establish equivalence. These results support a modest answer-selection gain for the recorded tuning configuration and a reproducible diagnostic accounting, without attributing corrected labels to specific grounding mechanisms or claiming superiority over matched supervised tuning.