Jian Chang
Author directory2026
TTSR: Test-Time Self-Evolving via Reflection
Haoyang He | Zihua Rong | Yunjia Zhao | Lan Yang | Jian Chang | Honggang Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Haoyang He | Zihua Rong | Yunjia Zhao | Lan Yang | Jian Chang | Honggang Zhang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Test-time training (TTT) adapts large language models (LLMs) during inference using only unlabeled test inputs. Existing methods, however, face two major bottlenecks on hard reasoning tasks: (1) lack of learnable samples, as self-generated pseudo-labels on difficult questions are often noisy and yield unstable rewards; and (2) inefficient exploration, as performance gains depend on repeatedly sampling many rollouts without explicit diagnosis of why previous attempts fail. We propose TTSR (Test-Time Self-Reflection), a self-evolving framework based on a reflect-then-synthesize paradigm. A single pretrained model alternates between a Student role and a Teacher role: the Student solves test questions and updates, while the Teacher analyzes failed trajectories and synthesizes targeted variant questions closer to the Student’s capability frontier. TTSR further maintains a cross-iteration weakness memory and compiles persistent weaknesses into a lightweight strategy note prepended to subsequent Student inputs, so diagnostic knowledge can guide exploration and gradually fade as weaknesses are resolved. Experiments on challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks show consistent test-time improvements, strong cross-backbone generalization, and transfer to general-domain reasoning tasks.