The paper introduces TASCO, a test‑time adaptation framework that enhances Large Language Model reasoning by incorporating local stability into confidence‑based adaptation while keeping the model frozen. TASCO optimizes a lightweight task‑level prefix using two perturbation strategies—Random Perturbation for distributional stability and Sharpness‑Aware Perturbation for worst‑case sensitivity—to ensure that high confidence aligns with correctness. Experiments show that TASCO improves reasoning accuracy and token efficiency across various LLMs and benchmarks, and behavioral analyses confirm that it maintains stable confidence without over‑concentrating the predictive distribution.
By Bincheng Gu, Min Gao, Zongwei Wang, Yibing Bai, Yulan He, Junliang Yu
The paper introduces TASCO, a test‑time adaptation method that improves Large Language Model reasoning by optimizing stability‑aware confidence. It keeps the LLM frozen and uses a lightweight task‑level prefix, applying Random Perturbation for distributional stability and Sharpness‑Aware Perturbation for worst‑case sensitivity. Experiments show enhanced reasoning accuracy and token efficiency across various LLMs and benchmarks, while preserving stable confidence without over‑concentrating predictions.
The paper introduces Test-Time Calibration Learning (TTCL), a label‑free framework that adapts both reasoning accuracy and verbalized confidence of large language models directly on unlabeled target‑task data. TTCL generates self‑supervision signals from multiple model responses, enabling calibration without ground‑truth labels and proving theoretically as a bounded surrogate for the ideal calibration objective. Experiments on mathematical reasoning and factual question answering show consistent improvements, with base models gaining an average 40.13% in accuracy and 70.80% in ECE reduction across eight benchmarks, and further gains under domain shift.
By Zizhuo Zhang, Xiong Peng, Jingwei Sun, Rong Yao, Shixiong Kai, Mingxuan Yuan, Bo Han
arXiv:2610.31820v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Reliable confidence estimation is essential for trustworthy deployment of large language models (LLMs), but dedicated confidence training stage require...
By Shujin Wu, Heng Ji
arXiv:2507.21931v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) often produce plausible but poorly-calibrated answers, limiting their reliability on reasoning-intensive tasks....
By Carel van Niekerk, Renato Vukovic, Benjamin Ruppik, Hsien-chin Lin, Shutong Feng, Milica Ga\v{s}i\'c
arXiv:2606. 03608v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Test-time reinforcement learning has emerged as a promising paradigm for enhancing the complex reasoning abilities of large language models in a completely label-free manner.
By Jiahui Li, Jianfeng Shan, Wenpei Chen, Shunyu Wu, Jian Lou, Wenjie Feng, Dan Li, See-Kiong Ng
arXiv:2607. 01612v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training large language models (LLMs) with reinforcement learning (RL) has significantly advanced their performance on reasoning and question-answering tasks.
By Xuqing Yang, Yi Yuan, Shanzhe Lei, Xuhong Wang
Self-distillation improves reasoning in large language models by using the model's own rollouts as training signal, typically through implicit logit-level alignment that minimizes KL divergence toward a privileged target distribution. However, because this supervision is generated via uncontrolled sampling, it provides no diagnostic insight into the model's specific errors or corrective guidance for its individual failure patterns.
TrajEvolve introduces a trajectory evolution paradigm with hindsight credit assignment to improve reinforcement learning for large language models on long-horizon tasks. It refines low-quality steps in historical trajectories to expose the policy to high-quality compositions that are rarely sampled, and reformulates step-level continuous credit assignment as a binary classification problem to identify redundant steps. Experiments on two datasets show that this approach outperforms existing methods.
By Yi Wen, Hao Chen, Wanyu Wang, Maolin Wang, Pengyue Jia, Derong Xu, Huize Tan, Yingyi Zhang, Wenlin Zhang, Weihong Luo, Xiku Du, Xiangyu Zhao
Uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods for language models are typically evaluated on single-turn outputs, where uncertainty is attached to one generated answer. For LLM agents, however, the unit of observation is an interactive trajectory, where the model can ask clarifying questions, call tools, update state, and make intermediate decisions whose errors propagate to the final outcome.
arXiv:2607. 07626v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable confidence estimation is essential for deploying large language models (LLMs) in confidence-aware systems, where downstream decisions such as retrieval, tool use, and adaptive computation depend on accurately estimating answer reliability.
By Sahil Kale
arXiv:2608. 06861v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training large language model agents in long-horizon environments requires assigning credit from sparse terminal outcomes to individual actions.
By Hongxi Yan, Ziyue Huang, Shichao Fan, Qingjie Liu