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Learning to Discover at Test Time

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How can we use AI to discover a new state of the art for a scientific problem? Prior work in test-time scaling, such as AlphaEvolve, performs search by prompting a frozen LLM. We perform reinforcement learning at test time, so the LLM can continue to train, but now with experience specific to the test problem. This form of continual learning is quite special, because its goal is to produce one great solution rather than many good ones on average, and to solve this very problem rather than generalize to other problems. Therefore, our learning objective and search subroutine are designed to prioritize the most promising solutions. We call this method Test-Time Training to Discover (TTT-Discover). Following prior work, we focus on problems with continuous rewards. We report results for every problem we attempted, across mathematics, GPU kernel engineering, algorithm design, and biology. TTT-Discover sets the new state of the art in almost all of them: (i) Erd\H{o}s' minimum overlap problem and an autocorrelation inequality; (ii) a GPUMode kernel competition (up to $2\times$ faster than prior art); (iii) past AtCoder algorithm competitions; and (iv) denoising problem in single-cell analysis. Our solutions are reviewed by experts or the organizers. All our results are achieved with an open model, OpenAI gpt-oss-120b, and can be reproduced with our publicly available code, in contrast to previous best results that required closed frontier models. Our test-time training runs are performed using Tinker, an API by Thinking Machines, with a cost of only a few hundred dollars per problem.

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representative citing papers

LLMs Improving LLMs: Agentic Discovery for Test-Time Scaling

cs.CL · 2026-05-08 · conditional · novelty 8.0 · 2 refs

AutoTTS discovers width-depth test-time scaling controllers through agentic search in a pre-collected trajectory environment, yielding better accuracy-cost tradeoffs than hand-designed baselines on math reasoning tasks at low cost.

The Power of Test-Time Training for Approximate Sampling

cs.DS · 2026-06-09 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

Establishes a quadratic lower bound on query complexity for sampling from large classes of distributions given approximate density oracles, answers an open question on optimality of random walks, and shows circumvention for bounded classes as an abstraction of TTT.

Alpha-RTL: Test-Time Training for RTL Hardware Optimization

cs.LG · 2026-06-03 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

TTT-RTL performs per-design test-time RL on an LLM policy with EDA-derived PPA rewards and an adaptive KL controller, reducing geometric-mean PPA product by 65.1% on RTLLM v2.0 and ADP by 59.4% on an industrial FPU unit.

What Do Evolutionary Coding Agents Evolve?

cs.NE · 2026-05-19 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

Evolutionary coding agents achieve most benchmark gains through a small subset of edit types and by cycling previously deleted code lines rather than developing new algorithmic structures.

CODA: Rewriting Transformer Blocks as GEMM-Epilogue Programs

cs.LG · 2026-05-19 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0 · 2 refs

CODA re-expresses most non-attention Transformer computations as GEMM-plus-epilogue programs using a constrained set of composable primitives to keep intermediate results on-chip and cut global memory traffic.

Test-Time Learning with an Evolving Library

cs.LG · 2026-05-14 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

EvoLib enables LLMs to accumulate, reuse, and evolve knowledge abstractions from inference trajectories at test time, yielding substantial gains on math reasoning, code generation, and agentic benchmarks without parameter updates or supervision.

Harnessing Agentic Evolution

cs.AI · 2026-05-13 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

AEvo introduces a meta-agent that edits the evolution procedure or agent context based on accumulated state, outperforming baselines by 26% relative improvement on agentic benchmarks and achieving SOTA on open-ended tasks.

Meta-Harness: End-to-End Optimization of Model Harnesses

cs.AI · 2026-03-30 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

Meta-Harness discovers improved harness code for LLMs via agentic search over prior execution traces, yielding 7.7-point gains on text classification with 4x fewer tokens and 4.7-point gains on math reasoning across held-out models.

Test Time Training for Supervised Causal Learning

cs.LG · 2026-05-28 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

TTT-SCL dynamically generates test-aligned training sets for supervised causal learning using score-based functions and outperforms prior SCL and traditional causal discovery methods on benchmarks and real data.

Self-Improving Language Models with Bidirectional Evolutionary Search

cs.CL · 2026-05-27 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Bidirectional Evolutionary Search augments autoregressive expansion with evolutionary recombination operators and dense backward subgoal feedback to produce better candidates than standard best-of-N or tree search for language model self-improvement.

Epistemic Uncertainty for Test-Time Discovery

cs.LG · 2026-05-11 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

UG-TTT adds epistemic uncertainty measured by adapter disagreement as an exploration bonus in RL for LLMs, raising maximum reward and diversity on scientific discovery benchmarks.

Evaluation-driven Scaling for Scientific Discovery

cs.LG · 2026-04-21 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

SimpleTES scales test-time evaluation in LLMs to discover state-of-the-art solutions on 21 scientific problems across six domains, outperforming frontier models and optimization pipelines with examples like 2x faster LASSO and new Erdos constructions.

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