The paper introduces Test‑Time Policy Optimization (TTPO), a method that enables large language models to improve mathematical reasoning during inference without relying on ground‑truth labels. TTPO uses majority‑vote pseudo‑labels to guide an asymmetric objective: agreeing rollouts are distilled via On‑Policy Self‑Distillation, while disagreeing rollouts are penalized with Grouped Reinforcement Learning, with token‑level selection refining both branches. Experiments show that TTPO matches label‑supervised OPSD on five benchmarks, boosts Qwen3‑1.7B from 38.0 % to 45.2 % in test‑time training, and achieves significant gains without explicit reasoning steps, demonstrating strong cross‑task generalization.
The paper introduces T$^3$RL, a tool‑verification framework for test‑time reinforcement learning (TTRL) that mitigates the false‑popular failure mode by using external tool evidence to upweight verified rollouts during voting. By grounding pseudo‑label construction in verified evidence, T$^3$RL produces more reliable pseudo‑labels and improves performance over standard TTRL on math benchmarks such as MATH‑500, AMC, and AIME 2024. The approach positions T$^3$RL as a verified online data synthesizer, highlighting the importance of tool verification for reliable online adaptation and demonstrating extensibility to other verifiable domains.
By Ruotong Liao, Nikolai R\"ohrich, Xiaohan Wang, Yuhui Zhang, Yasaman Samadzadeh, Volker Tresp, Serena Yeung-Levy
arXiv:2608.23493v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Self-reflection is a powerful mechanism for credit assignment in human learning, converting sparse outcome feedback into actionable guidance. However,...
By Jialong Liu, Yuling Shi, Ning Yang, Xiaodong Gu, Zuchao Li
arXiv:2609.16660v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Test-time reinforcement learning adapts a model on its own unlabeled test set using majority-vote pseudo-labels and has shown strong results in mathema...
By Kailong Fan, Anqi Pu, Yichen Wu, Wanhua Li, Yicong Li, Hanspeter Pfister, Huafeng Liu, Xiang Li, Quanzheng Li, Ning Guo
arXiv:2609.37119v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Recent approaches to reinforcement learning (RL) post-training for large language models increasingly remove the critic to reduce training instabilit...
By Hongyang Li, Xiao Li, Caesar Wu, Said Mammar, Gr\'egoire Danoy, Pascal Bouvry
SIPO (Self‑Instructing Policy Optimization) unifies reinforcement learning with on‑policy self‑distillation by using a contrastive self‑teacher to generate token‑level credit signals. The method samples multiple rollouts per prompt, pairs each with a reference answer and its mistakes, and uses the difference in teacher log‑probabilities to provide dense feedback while still respecting the overall task reward. Experiments on reasoning and code‑generation benchmarks show that SIPO outperforms both RLVR and OPSD baselines without requiring an external teacher or extra generation steps.
By Zhenrui Yue, Huimin Zeng, Yueqi Wang, Yaokun Liu, Fengran Mo, Jinghan Zhang, Mung Yao Jia, Gyuseok Lee, Yang Zhang, Na Wei, Dong Wang
The paper shows that fine‑tuning a large language model (LLM) with a debate framework—where a generator and a critic compete and a weaker LLM judge adjudicates—reduces reward hacking compared to standard reinforcement learning from AI feedback (RLAIF). In experiments on mathematics tasks, the debate approach keeps the judge’s performance stable, achieving a 45% higher peak validation accuracy than the RLAIF baseline and mitigating the rapid exploitation of judge errors. Additional findings indicate that weakening the judge speeds hacking unless countered by extra debate rounds, that debate can override misalignment prompts, and that word‑limit constraints on critiques help balance the game and prevent judge hacking.
whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates a practical method to curb reward hacking in RL‑based AI systems, addressing a key obstacle for safely scaling AI oversight."
By Zachary Kenton, Lili Janzer, Rory Greig, Tian Huey Teh, Kirill Tyshchuk, Jonah Brown-Cohen, Harri Edwards, Senthooran Rajamanoharan, Noah Y. Siegel, Natasha Jaques, Rohin Shah
arXiv:2608. 06243v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) improves the reasoning capabilities of large language models using automatically verifiable outcome signals, but these signals are typically sparse and at the sequence-level.
By ZhiYan Hou, Xinyu Tang, Hongyan An, Jianjin Zhang, Weizhen Wang, Yunyun Han, Gengsheng Li, Xiangzhao Hao, Haiyun Guo, Wenbin Hu, Jinqiao Wang, Yafeng Deng
arXiv:2607. 28457v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scaling test-time computation can improve language-model reasoning, but uniform budgets waste computation on easy inputs, while verifier-guided refinement relies on external feedback.
By Hongyu Chen, Liang Lin, Guangrun Wang
arXiv:2609.37066v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Post-training is central to mathematical reasoning in modern large language models (LLMs), but endpoint pass@1 alone underidentifies what has changed...
By Hongyang Li, Yiming Zhu, Xiao Li, Caesar Wu, Said Mammar, Pascal Bouvry
arXiv:2605. 21125v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), a prominent algorithm within the Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) framework, has achieved strong results in improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs).
By Xixiang He, Qiyao Sun, Ao Cheng, Xingming Li, Xuanyu Ji, Hailun Lu, Runke Huang, Qingyong Hu
arXiv:2608. 06296v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy (Self-)Distillation (OPD / OPSD) has shown strong potential for post-training large language models (LLMs).
By Yijiang Li, Bingyang Wang, Yijun Liang, Yunjie Tian, Di Fu, Nuno Vasconcelos