The paper surveys the emerging field of self‑improving AI systems that refine their behavior during deployment. It introduces a unified framework called feedback‑driven Test‑Time Intelligence (TTI) to connect two previously separate research directions: model state modification via test‑time signals and prediction enhancement through additional inference resources. The survey reviews key methods, applications across vision, language, multimodal learning, generative models, robotics, and healthcare, and outlines open challenges and a research roadmap.
arXiv:2608. 12307v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work on distillation transfers the capabilities of large models to smaller ones often by updating the latter's parameters, through teacher forcing, on-policy distillation, and related training-time methods.
Recent work on distillation transfers the capabilities of large models to smaller ones often by updating the latter's parameters, through teacher forcing, on-policy distillation, and related training-time methods. In this paper, we ask whether such transfer can instead occur at test time.
TTSR (Test-Time Self-Reflection) is a framework that enables large language models to adapt during inference by alternating between a Student role that solves test questions and a Teacher role that analyzes failures and generates targeted variant questions. The method incorporates a weakness memory and a strategy note to guide exploration, reducing reliance on noisy pseudo-labels and inefficient rollouts. Experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate consistent test-time improvements, strong cross-backbone generalization, and transfer to general-domain reasoning tasks.
The paper introduces Test-Time Adaptation through Human‑Agent Interaction (TAHI), a method that uses iterative human feedback to adapt AI agents to individual users’ criteria. By integrating cross‑session interaction data into agent context and weights, and building an evolving rubric module, the authors demonstrate that agents can improve task success by 4.5–20.9% after only a few interactions. The evolving rubric also serves as a scalable annotation tool, detecting 16.0–22.3% more failures than language models or humans alone, and personalized agents can even generalize improvements up to 8.8% across users.
arXiv:2606. 05684v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A central challenge for language agents is utilizing past experience to adapt to dynamic test-time conditions.
arXiv:2607. 21971v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Test-time scaling through iterative self-evolution with environment feedback, as demonstrated by AlphaEvolve, shows remarkable performance gains.
arXiv:2604. 00830v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Test-Time Learning (TTL) enables language agents to iteratively refine their performance through repeated interactions with the environment at inference time.
arXiv:2602. 06136v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Test-time adaptation (TTA) offers a compelling remedy for machine learning (ML) models that degrade under domain shifts, improving generalisation on-the-fly with only unlabelled samples.
arXiv:2602. 12279v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unified models can handle both multimodal understanding and generation within a single architecture, yet they typically operate in a single pass without iteratively refining their outputs.
arXiv:2606. 31270v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Computer-use agents, which leverage multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to operate computers and complete tasks, have attracted significant attention for their utility and versatility.
arXiv:2601. 18197v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have significantly advanced GUI agents' capabilities in parsing textual instructions, interpreting screen content, and executing tasks, a critical challenge persists: the irreversibility of agent operations-where a single erroneous action can trigger catastrophic deviations.
arXiv:2607. 03900v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Test-time adaptation (TTA) has emerged as a popular paradigm for improving the performance of vision-language models (e.