Test-Time Meta-Adaptation with Self-Synthesis
Organizations: Stanford University
Abstract
As strong general reasoners, large language models (LLMs) encounter diverse domains and tasks, where the ability to adapt and self-improve at test time is valuable. We introduce MASS, a meta-learning framework that enables LLMs to self-adapt by generating problem-specific synthetic training data and performing targeted self-updates optimized for downstream performance at inference time. We train this behavior end-to-end via bilevel optimization: an inner loop adapts on self-generated examples while an outer loop meta-learns data-attribution signals and rewards post-update task performance. The synthetic data is optimized with scalable meta-gradients, backpropagating the downstream loss through the inner updates to reward useful generations. Experiments on mathematical reasoning show that MASS learns to synthesize per-instance curricula that yield effective, data-efficient test-time adaptation.
Figures & tables
| Method | MATH-500 |
|---|---|
| Base | 43.6% |
| Base TTT | 41.2% |
| Base TT-SS | 46.6% |
| Solver GRPO | 49.1% |
| MASS | 59.0% |
| MASS gold | 54.1% |