Li Chen
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2026
TR-ICRL: Test-Time Rethinking for In-Context Reinforcement Learning
Wenxuan Jiang | Yuxin Zuo | Zijian Zhang | Xuecheng Wu | Zining Fan | Wenxuan Liu | Li Chen | Xiaoyu Li | Xuezhi Cao | Xiaolong Jin | Ninghao Liu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Wenxuan Jiang | Yuxin Zuo | Zijian Zhang | Xuecheng Wu | Zining Fan | Wenxuan Liu | Li Chen | Xiaoyu Li | Xuezhi Cao | Xiaolong Jin | Ninghao Liu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
In-Context Reinforcement Learning (ICRL) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to learn online from external rewards directly within the context window. However, a central challenge in ICRL is reward estimation, as models typically lack access to ground-truths during inference. To address this limitation, we propose Test-Time Rethinking for In-Context Reinforcement Learning (TR-ICRL), a novel ICRL prompting framework that leverages Test-Time Scaling to generate reward-like feedback during inference. TR-ICRL operates by first retrieving the most relevant instances from an unlabeled evaluation set for a given query. During each ICRL iteration, LLM generates a set of candidate answers for every retrieved instance. Next, a pseudo-label is derived from this set through majority voting. In the end, this self-improvement context is integrated with the original query to form a comprehensive prompt, with the answer determining through a final round of majority voting. TR-ICRL is evaluated on mainstream reasoning and knowledge-intensive tasks, where it demonstrates significant performance gains. Remarkably, TR-ICRL improves Qwen2.5-7B by 21.23% on average on MedQA and even 137.59% on AIME2024. Extensive ablation studies and analyses further validate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach. Our code is available at https://github.com/pangpang-xuan/TR_ICRL.