cs.AIJan 28, 2026

Policy of Thoughts: Scaling Test-Time Training for LLM Reasoning via Online Policy Evolution

Authors: Zhengbo JiaoHongyu XianQinglong WangYunpu MaZhebo WangZifan ZhangDezhang KongMeng Han

Organizations: Zhejiang University · South China Normal University · Shanghai University of Finance and Economics · LMU Munich · Wuhan University

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) struggle with complex, long-horizon reasoning due to instability caused by their frozen policy assumption. Current test-time scaling methods treat execution feedback merely as an external signal for filtering or rewriting trajectories, without internalizing it to improve the underlying reasoning strategy. Inspired by Popper's epistemology of "conjectures and refutations," we argue that intelligence requires real-time evolution of the model's policy through learning from failed attempts. We introduce Policy of Thoughts (PoT), a framework that recasts reasoning as a within-instance online optimization process. PoT first generates diverse candidate solutions via an efficient exploration mechanism, then uses Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to update a transient LoRA adapter based on execution feedback. This closed-loop design enables dynamic, instance-specific refinement of the model's reasoning priors. Experiments show that PoT dramatically boosts performance: a 4B model achieves 49.71% accuracy on LiveCodeBench, outperforming GPT-4o and DeepSeek-V3 despite being over 50 smaller.

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