MS-TTRL: Breaking the Frequency Conflict in Multiple-Solution Test-Time Reinforcement Learning

Test-Time Reinforcement Learning (TTRL) enables large language models to adapt directly on unlabeled test problems by constructing pseudo-labels from multiple sampled responses. However, existing TTRL methods typically apply the same expensive sampling and optimization procedure to all test problems, despite substantial differences in their training utility. In this paper, we study whether such problems can be identified before costly test-time training, without access to ground-truth answers. We uncover a stable relationship between internal response representations and problem-level empirical accuracy. Specifically, we define COS as the cosine similarity between a model's response representation and a correctness-related direction constructed from an independent question-answering dataset. COS consistently correlates with problem solvability across different models, datasets, and experimental settings, and we further provide a theoretical analysis explaining this relationship. Building on this finding, we propose SelectTTRL, a representation-guided data selection method that ranks test problems using COS and applies TTRL only to a selected percentile interval. SelectTTRL leaves the standard TTRL pipeline unchanged for the selected problems, while avoiding unnecessary multi-response sampling and reinforcement learning updates on the remaining ones. Experiments across multiple reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that SelectTTRL substantially reduces test-time computation while maintaining or improving the performance of standard TTRL. Code is available at https://github.com/heyiliyi/SelectTTRL-public.

Test-time reinforcement learning (TTRL) reports substantial accuracy gains on mathematical reasoning benchmarks using majority vote as a pseudo-label signal. We argue these gains are systematically misinterpreted: most reflect sharpening of already-solvable problems rather than genuine learning, while problems corrupted from correct to incorrect outnumber truly learned ones, and this damage is irreversible once majority vote locks onto a wrong answer. Per-problem tracking reveals that correct-answer signals in low-ability problems are briefly active before being permanently suppressed, a phenomenon we term the Correct-Answer Extinction Window, with Flip Rate (FR) as its leading indicator. We thus propose TTRL-Guard, a lightweight framework with three mechanisms targeting the extinction window: Flip-Rate-Aware Reward Scaling (FRS) down-weights at-risk updates as FR declines, Minority-Preserving Sampling (MPS) retains gradient signal from minority correct answers, and Risk-Conditioned Sparse Updatings (RCSU) suspends updates on polarized problems. Experiments across three models and four benchmarks show that TTRL-Guard achieves the best average pass@1 on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct and Qwen3-4B, improves relatively over TTRL by +54% on AIME 2025.

Test-Time Reinforcement Learning (TTRL) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance reasoning capabilities on unlabeled test streams by deriving pseudo-rewards from majority voting consensus. However, existing TTRL methods rely exclusively on positive pseudo-labeling strategies. Such reliance becomes vulnerable under challenging scenarios where answer distributions are highly dispersed, resulting in weak consensus that inadvertently reinforces incorrect trajectories as supervision signals. In this paper, we propose SCRL (Selective-Complementary Reinforcement Learning), a robust test-time reinforcement learning framework that effectively mitigates label noise amplification. SCRL develops Selective Positive Pseudo-Labeling, which enforces strict consensus criteria to filter unreliable majorities. Complementarily, SCRL introduces Entropy-Gated Negative Pseudo-Labeling, the first negative supervision mechanism in TTRL, to reliably prune incorrect trajectories based on generation uncertainty. Extensive experiments on multiple reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that SCRL achieves substantial improvements over baselines, while maintaining robust generalization and training stability under constrained rollout budgets. Our code is available at https://github.com/Jasper-Yan/SCRL.