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Papers

May 20, 2026cs.LG

Hierarchical Variational Policies for Reward-Guided Diffusion

Adapting pretrained diffusion models to downstream objectives such as inverse problems often requires expensive test-time guidance or optimization. We propose a principled framework for generating high-quality reward-aligned samples at substantially reduced inference cost. Our approach formulates test-time adaptation as a hierarchical variational model, where control is amortized into a lightweight yet expressive stochastic policy. This formulation naturally supports few-step diffusion sampling: large step sizes enable fast inference, while the learned policy maintains sample quality by providing structured per-step control. The resulting fully amortized sampler achieves a strong quality--speed tradeoff, matching or exceeding recent test-time scaling baselines while requiring significantly less compute. For example, on 4x super-resolution, our method achieves better perceptual quality with more than 5x faster inference compared to the best-performing baseline. We further extend our approach to a semi-amortized regime that combines cheap amortized proposals with limited test-time optimization, achieving state-of-the-art perceptual quality across several challenging inverse problems.
Kushagra Pandey, Farrin Marouf Sofian, Jan Niklas Groeneveld +2
Jul 23, 2026cs.LG

Self-Poisoning in Adaptive Out-of-Distribution Detection: A Sharp-Threshold Theory and Certified Label-Free Calibration

Test-time adaptive out-of-distribution (OOD) detectors update a memory bank from the unlabelled stream. We show this adaptation obeys a provable dynamical law. Modelling bank impurity as a generalized Pólya urn, we prove almost-sure convergence to a mean-field equilibrium whose slope acts as a reproduction number. Below one, impurity stays benign. Above one, the bank is fully poisoned and the detector collapses. The measured admission kernel is affine (R2≥0.996R^2 \ge 0.996) with slope just below one in every encoder family (a protocol signature), so this detector class is near-critical by design, and across 96 settings the predicted threshold matches the empirical collapse, where ungated dictionaries lose up to 0.1630.163 AUROC. We then prove that a certified admission gate, reading only a frozen reserve, severs the feedback loop and removes the transition at every contamination rate, even adversarially, while controlling false positives label-free. For the complementary static-calibration failure under drift we give CDC, which restores nominal FPR label-free on all tested drift-affected cells. Finally we prove a two-world impossibility theorem. Drift and contamination are indistinguishable without labels, forcing a closed-form power ceiling our procedure approaches. Together these give a complete possibility/impossibility characterization of label-free adaptive OOD detection.
Vishnu Bindu Balachandran
Nov 13, 2023cs.LG

DIRA-SS:Dynamic Domain Incremental Regularised Adaptation -- Self-Supervised

Autonomous systems (AS) often rely on Deep Neural Network (DNN) classifiers to operate in complex and dynamically changing environments. However, during operation, these classifiers may encounter domains that differ from those seen during development, causing performance degradation under distribution shift. Removing systems from operation for labelled data collection and retraining is often impractical, particularly when adaptation must occur quickly and at scale. This paper introduces DIRA-SS, a self-supervised extension of Dynamic Incremental Regularised Adaptation (DIRA) that enables online domain adaptation using only a small number of unlabelled target-domain samples. DIRA-SS augments an existing classifier with an auxiliary retraining branch and adapts the shared feature representation through a rotation-prediction task, while elastic weight consolidation regularises important source-domain parameters to reduce destructive updates. This allows the model to benefit from transfer learning without requiring classification labels during operation. We evaluate DIRA-SS on CIFAR-10C, CIFAR-100C, and ImageNet-C using ResNet architectures under severe common corruptions. The results show that DIRA-SS substantially improves performance over the non-adapted source model, achieves accuracy close to the supervised DIRA method, and outperforms existing unsupervised test-time adaptation baselines on ImageNet-C when using only 100 target-domain samples.
Abanoub Ghobrial, Kerstin Eder
May 7, 2026cs.AI

BitCal-TTS: Bit-Calibrated Test-Time Scaling for Quantized Reasoning Models

Post-training quantization makes large reasoning models practical under tight memory and latency budgets, but it can distort the online signals that drive adaptive test-time compute allocation. Under a fixed cap on the number of newly generated tokens, miscalibrated confidence can lead to harmful early halting: the model may surface a plausible final line while the underlying reasoning is still wrong, or the controller may stop before the trace has stabilized. We study this interaction for greedy 4-bit inference and propose BitCal-TTS, a lightweight runtime controller that combines (i) inexpensive online proxies for token-level uncertainty and reasoning-trace stability, (ii) a bit-conditioned confidence rescaling that is conservative at low nominal precision, and (iii) a bit-aware post-marker confirmation horizon designed for GSM8K-style structured outputs. The method requires no fine-tuning of the base model and integrates with standard Hugging Face 4-bit inference using forward hooks for logits and last-layer hidden states. On small evaluation shards of GSM8K with Qwen2.5 Instruct models, BitCal-TTS improves exact-match accuracy over a non-bit-aware adaptive baseline at the 7B and 14B scales while preserving substantial token savings relative to fixed-budget decoding. At a token cap of B=512, on the evaluation shards we report (N=54 for 7B and N=35 for 14B; not the full GSM8K test set), accuracy gains are +3.7 points (7B) and +2.8 points (14B), with the premature-stop rate falling from 14.8% to 11.1% on 7B and from 17.1% to 11.4% on 14B. We report Wilson 95% confidence intervals throughout and explicitly discuss the limited statistical power of the partial-shard comparisons. We release code and figure-generation scripts to support full reproduction.
Sai Babu Patarlapalli, Surya Teja Avvaru
Jun 5, 2026cs.CV

SS-TPT: Stability and Suitability-Guided Test-Time Prompt Tuning for Adversarially Robust Vision-Language Models

Vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP achieve strong zero-shot recognition but remain highly fragile under adversarial perturbations. Recent test-time adaptation defenses improve robustness by leveraging many augmented views, but this leads to impractical slowdown and a clear robustness-throughput trade-off. To address this challenge, we present Stability and Suitability-guided Test-time Prompt Tuning (SS-TPT), evaluating the quality of each augmented view via two complementary scores: (1) stability, measuring prediction invariance to weak augmentations, and (2) suitability, measuring feature-space density among views. These stability and suitability (SS) scores guide both adaptation and inference through an SS-guided consistency loss and an SS-weighted prediction, amplifying trustworthy views while suppressing corrupted ones. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SS-TPT significantly outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior robustness-throughput trade-offs across diverse datasets and varying numbers of views, thereby demonstrating both strong practicality and generality. Our code is available at https://github.com/sunoh-kim/SS-TPT.
Sunoh Kim, Daeho Um
Apr 17, 2026cs.CL

AdaExplore: Failure-Driven Adaptation and Diversity-Preserving Search for Efficient Kernel Generation

Recent large language model (LLM) agents have shown promise in using execution feedback for test-time adaptation. However, robust self-improvement remains far from solved: most approaches still treat each problem instance independently, without accumulating reusable knowledge. This limitation is particularly pronounced in domain-specific languages such as Triton, which are underrepresented in LLM pretraining data. Their strict constraints and non-linear optimization landscape further make naive generation and local refinement unreliable. We propose AdaExplore, an agent framework that enables self-improvement via accumulated execution feedback for performance-critical kernel code generation through two complementary stages: failure-driven adaptation and diversity-preserving search, jointly improving correctness and optimization performance without additional fine-tuning or external knowledge. In the adaptation stage, the agent synthesizes tasks and converts recurring failures into a reusable memory of validity rules, helping subsequent generations remain within the feasible set. In the search stage, the agent organizes candidate kernels as a tree and alternates between small local refinements and larger structural regeneration, allowing it to explore the optimization landscape beyond local optima. Experiments on kernel runtime optimization benchmarks validate these gains: AdaExplore achieves 3.12x and 1.72x speedups on KernelBench Level-2 and Level-3, respectively, within 100 steps, and continues to improve with additional computation.
Weihua Du, Jingming Zhuo, Yixin Dong +9
Jul 4, 2026cs.CV

USE: A Unified Self-Ensembling Framework for Test-Time Prompt Tuning

Test-time adaptation (TTA) has emerged as a popular paradigm for improving the performance of vision-language models (e.g., CLIP) on downstream tasks. Among existing CLIP-based TTA methods, Test-Time Prompt Tuning (TPT) is a pioneering work that optimizes textual prompts using multiple test-time augmentations and remains a strong baseline to date. In this work, we revisit TPT and reveal that its optimization can be interpreted as implicitly learning from self-generated pseudo labels. Building on this perspective, we propose a unified self-ensembling framework (USE) that ensures consistency between the optimization and inference stages. During optimization, we introduce a simple yet effective self-ensembling (SE) strategy that emphasizes the test image itself over its augmented views adaptively to obtain more reliable pseudo labels. To fully exploit the potential of augmentations, we further apply the same strategy at inference time, unifying the objectives of both stages. Notably, SE can also act as a lightweight optimization-free TTA method. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate that SE and USE outperform their counterparts, respectively. Furthermore, SE yields consistent performance gains when integrated with existing TTA methods. The code is available at https://github.com/sirujiang/USE.
Siru Jiang, Jian Liang, Ran He +1
Apr 30, 2026physics.geo-ph

Parameter-Efficient Adaptation of Pre-Trained Vision Foundation Models for Active and Passive Seismic Data Denoising

The demand for high-resolution subsurface imaging and continuous Earth monitoring has driven rapid growth in active and passive seismic data from dense geophone deployments, distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) arrays, and large-scale 2D and 3D surveys. This expansion makes complex noise suppression increasingly challenging, especially when signal fidelity must be preserved. Conventional supervised deep learning methods are often task-specific, require large paired datasets, and can suffer from domain shift under new acquisition conditions. Foundation models offer a promising alternative, but pre-training seismic foundation models from scratch requires massive domain-specific data and substantial computation. We propose an efficient framework that repurposes general-purpose Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) for geophysical tasks through Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning. The architecture uses a pre-trained VFM, a DINOv3 encoder, adapted with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to enable effective feature adaptation with few additional parameters. To improve robustness under unseen field conditions without ground truth, we introduce a kurtosis-guided unsupervised test-time adaptation module that updates only LoRA parameters during inference. This module self-calibrates the model to site-specific noise by identifying information-rich regions via kurtosis and performing self-training without labeled data. Experiments on public exploration seismic images and DAS vertical seismic profiling data from the Utah FORGE site show that the framework matches or outperforms domain-specific models. Tests on unseen cross-site data from a land survey in China and the Groß Schönebeck geothermal site in Germany further demonstrate strong generalization and effective signal-noise separation. These results highlight the potential of adapting pre-trained VFMs to data-intensive problems in exploration seismology.
Jiahua Zhao, Umair bin Waheed, Jing Sun +3
Jan 16, 2026cs.CL

Predict the Retrieval! Test time adaptation for Retrieval Augmented Generation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a powerful approach for enhancing large language models' question-answering capabilities through the integration of external knowledge. However, when adapting RAG systems to specialized domains, challenges arise from distribution shifts, resulting in suboptimal generalization performance. In this work, we propose TTARAG, a test-time adaptation method that dynamically updates the language model's parameters during inference to improve RAG system performance in specialized domains. Our method introduces a simple yet effective approach where the model learns to predict retrieved content, enabling automatic parameter adjustment to the target domain. Through extensive experiments across six specialized domains, we demonstrate that TTARAG achieves substantial performance improvements over baseline RAG systems. Code available at https://github.com/sunxin000/TTARAG.
Xin Sun, Zhongqi Chen, Qiang Liu +5
Apr 1, 2026cs.LG

Toward Robust Open-set Adaptation: Synapse Consolidation Inspired by Rac1/MAPK Pathways

Large Language Models (LLMs) generalize across tasks through reusable representations and flexible reasoning, yet remain brittle in real deployment when faced with evolving tasks and continual distribution shift. While test-time adaptation addresses this by updating models with unsupervised objectives on test data, prevailing methods are fundamentally limited by their neglect of source knowledge preservation and adaptation signal reliability. Inspired by how Drosophila orchestrates memory update by balancing retroactive and proactive interference via Rac1 and MAPK pathways, we design Synapse Consolidation (SyCo) with two core components: a Rac1-inspired plasticity confiner and a MAPK-inspired update controller. The former dynamically confines plasticity to a tail-gradient subspace that is less critical for source knowledge, enabling rapid specialization while preserving source representations. The latter uses a tiered controller to suppress noisy updates and consolidate useful adaptations under non-stationary streams. To further model real deployments with multiple sources and continually emerging tasks, we introduce Multi-source Open-set Adaptation (MOA) setting, where a model is trained on multiple labeled source tasks and then adapts on open, non-stationary unlabeled test streams mixing seen and unseen tasks with partial overlap in label and intent space. Across 18 NLP datasets under the MOA setting, SyCo consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving 78.31% on unseen-task adaptation and 85.37% versus unseen-data shifts, setting a new state-of-the-art.
Xiao Zhang, Tianyu Hu, Juntao Lyu +2
May 22, 2026cs.RO

Turning Adaptation into Assets: Cross-Domain Bridging for Online Vision-Language Navigation

Navigating under non-stationary environment shifts poses a critical challenge for a Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) agent deployed in the wild. Yet, existing Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) methods for VLN largely treat online adaptation as transient, isolated updates, leading to catastrophic forgetting and negative transfer. To overcome these issues, we propose Inter-Domain BridgE with Historical Assets (IDEA), a novel TTA framework that transforms adaptation into the accumulation and composition of assets. Specifically, IDEA introduces soft prompts optimized via a Fisher-guided weighting scheme to capture the transferable knowledge. These optimized prompts are then augmented with domain coordinates to form a dynamic asset library. Leveraging this library, IDEA constructs a cross-domain bridge by projecting the target domain onto the convex hull of historical knowledge. These designs form a complementary loop: the evolving library underpins bridge construction, while the bridge provides superior initialization to accelerate asset optimization. Extensive experiments across REVERIE, R2R, and R2R-CE benchmarks demonstrate the consistent superiority of IDEA over existing methods, showcasing its ability to enable training-free adaptation via asset sharing.
Zixuan Hu, Xuantuo Huang, Yancheng Li +3
Aug 12, 2026cs.AI

CoAdapt-GUI: Joint Workflow Context and Policy Adaptation for Unseen GUI Applications

Mobile GUI agents remain brittle when deployed to applications absent from source training. We study novel-app generalization under a limited target interaction budget and without target demonstrations. We introduce CoAdapt-GUI, a test-time adaptation (TTA) framework that jointly adapts structured workflow context and policy from the agent's own target-app rollouts and rewards. The workflow context retains transferable procedures, failure modes, and verification rules while excluding app-bound source details. This separation allows reusable workflow knowledge to guide adaptation without transferring source-interface state. For policy adaptation, task-context-matched group-relative optimization updates a LoRA adapter on a frozen vision-language model. Across two unseen-app evaluations, CoAdapt-GUI reaches 45.0% on AndroidWorld-Generalization, compared with 37.5% for the reported Policy-Only TTA baseline, and raises AndroidWorld Plus performance from 38.6% to 52.9%. These results show that transfer-constrained workflow context provides substantial gains and that joint policy adaptation further improves held-out performance.
Linqiang Guo, Li Gu, Zihuan Jiang +8
May 12, 2026cs.CV

WildRelight: A Real-World Benchmark and Physics-Guided Adaptation for Single-Image Relighting

Recent single-image relighting methods, powered by advanced generative models, have achieved impressive photorealism on synthetic benchmarks. However, their effectiveness in the complex visual landscape of the real world remains largely unverified. A critical gap exists, as current datasets are typically designed for multi-view reconstruction and fail to address the unique challenges of single-image relighting. To bridge this synthetic-to-real gap, we introduce WildRelight, the first in-the-wild dataset specifically created for evaluating single-image relighting models. WildRelight features a diverse collection of high-resolution outdoor scenes, captured under strictly aligned, temporally varying natural illuminations, each paired with a high-dynamic-range environment map. Using this data, we establish a rigorous benchmark revealing that state-of-the-art models trained on synthetic data suffer from severe domain shifts. The strictly aligned temporal structure of WildRelight enables a new paradigm for domain adaptation. We demonstrate this by introducing a physics-guided inference framework that leverages the captured natural light evolution as a self-supervised constraint. By integrating Diffusion Posterior Sampling (DPS) with temporal Sampling-Aware Test-Time Adaptation (TTA), we show that the dataset allows synthetic models to align with real-world statistics on-the-fly, transforming the intractable sim-to-real challenge into a tractable self-supervised task. The dataset and code will be made publicly available to foster robust, physically-grounded relighting research.
Lezhong Wang, Mehmet Onurcan Kaya, Siavash Bigdeli +1
Apr 29, 2026cs.CV

SEAL: Semantic-aware Single-image Sticker Personalization with a Large-scale Sticker-tag Dataset

Synthesizing a target concept from a single reference image is challenging in diffusion-based personalized text-to-image generation, particularly for sticker personalization where prompts often require explicit attribute edits. With only one reference, test-time fine-tuning (TTF) methods tend to overfit, producing \textit{visual entanglement}, where background artifacts are absorbed into the learned concept, and \textit{structural rigidity}, where the model memorizes reference-specific spatial configurations and loses contextual controllability. To address these issues, we introduce \textbf{SE}mantic-aware single-image sticker person\textbf{AL}ization (\textbf{SEAL}), a plug-and-play, architecture-agnostic adaptation module that integrates into existing personalization pipelines without modifying their U-Net-based diffusion backbones. SEAL applies three components during embedding adaptation: (1) a Semantic-guided Spatial Attention Loss, (2) a Split-merge Token Strategy, and (3) Structure-aware Layer Restriction. To support sticker-domain personalization with attribute-level control, we present StickerBench, a large-scale sticker image dataset with structured tags under a six-attribute schema (Appearance, Emotion, Action, Camera Composition, Style, Background). These annotations provide a consistent interface for varying context while keeping target identity fixed, enabling systematic evaluation of identity disentanglement and contextual controllability. Experiments show that SEAL consistently improves identity preservation while maintaining contextual controllability, highlighting the importance of explicit spatial and structural constraints during test-time adaptation. The code, StickerBench, and project page will be publicly released.
Changhyun Roh, Yonghyun Jeong, Jonghyun Lee +2
Sep 7, 2026cs.RO

ICI-VLA: In-Context Imitation with Spatiotemporally Aligned Demonstrations for Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies are commonly adapted to new manipulation settings through additional gradient updates, which limits rapid deployment when task-specific data or compute is scarce. We present ICI-VLA, a training and retrieval framework that equips a text-action VLM with few-shot test-time adaptation through in-context demonstrations. Unlike mainstream VLA designs based on action-specific multimodal fusion, ICI-VLA retains the native text-generation interface. ICI-VLA updates its parameters only during offline training; at inference, the policy remains fixed and conditions action generation on retrieved micro-demonstrations. The framework decomposes long trajectories into short, semantically labeled examples and trains an RD-Encoder with positives mined by Dynamic Time Warping (DTW), aligning the retrieved context with the phase and geometry of the current subtask. We further introduce Target Action Masking, a context-corruption objective designed to reduce direct action copying and increase reliance on the current observation. ICI-VLA reaches average success rates of 97.7% on LIBERO and 60.4% on RoboTwin 2.0, exceeding the highest reported baseline average on RoboTwin 2.0 by 19.3 percentage points. It also achieves 83.2% across four physical tasks. These results indicate that a fixed VLA policy can benefit from conditioning on spatiotemporally aligned demonstrations at test time.
Songhua Yang, Ziyu Liu, Xuetao Li +3
Jul 27, 2026cs.CV

OPERA: Offline Policy-guided Expert Routing and Adaptation for Universal Biomedical Image Analysis

Biomedical image analysis spans diverse modalities and tasks, yet real-world deployment is hindered by severe distribution shifts across scanners, protocols, and patient populations. High-performing models consequently require repeated domain-specific fine-tuning, which is a costly cycle that becomes impractical when labels are scarce or privacy constraints limit data sharing. We propose OPERA (Offline Policy-guided Expert Routing and Adaptation), a multi-agent ensemble framework that addresses this deployment bottleneck by treating expert weight assignment as an offline policy learning problem: a routing policy is learned from a small validation set without gradient updates to any expert agent, then deployed with test-time adaptation to handle distribution shift. OPERA coordinates heterogeneous specialist agents through complementary mechanisms. The expert profiling module learns selection policies offline, enabling informed allocation of expertise. Each agent undergoes confidence calibration through temperature adjustment, ensuring more reliable probabilistic outputs. OPERA also incorporates distribution aware adaptation, where class weights are dynamically adjusted at the batch level using statistics derived from unlabeled test data. Instance level routing assigns each sample to the most suitable expert by leveraging inter model agreement and predictive entropy. We evaluate OPERA on 9 datasets covering fundus photography, chest X-ray, CT, MRI, and multimodal diagnostic benchmarks, comparing against 30+ baselines across classification, segmentation, and multimodal settings. OPERA consistently improves performance and calibration quality, demonstrating that offline policy-guided expert agents coordination is a practical path to deployable biomedical AI without retraining. Code is on \href{https://github.com/HUANGLIZI/OPERA}{GitHub}.
Zihan Li, Feiyang Liu, Dandan Shan +2
May 23, 2026eess.SY

Asymmetric Adaptation-based Real-time Fault Diagnosis Under Transitional Operating Conditions

Data streams in real-world industrial scenarios often contain transitional operating conditions that are uncovered during offline training, leading to significant distribution shifts. To bridge the gap between static offline models and dynamic online data, a novel asymmetric adaptation-based fault diagnosis method is proposed in this paper. Specifically, in the offline stage, we employ domain generalization techniques to extract domain-invariant features from multiple stable conditions and construct robust normalized fault prototypes as reference anchors. Subsequently, during online inference, we design an online test-time adaptation method based on a periodic prototype re-projection mechanism to dynamically update prototype positions. Furthermore, we utilize the geometric distribution derived from anchors to guide the updates of classifiers and adopt an asymmetric learning rate strategy for the feature extractor and classifier. The proposed approach ensures rapid adaptation to new transitional conditions while preserving the discriminative power inherited from the offline domain generalization initialization. Experimental results demonstrate that this mechanism effectively leverages offline generalized knowledge to guide online inference, significantly improving robustness in non-stationary environments.
Hongshuo Zhao, Zeyi Liu, Xiao He
Dec 25, 2025cs.CV

EraseLoRA: MLLM-Driven Foreground Exclusion and Background Subtype Aggregation for Dataset-Free Object Removal

Object removal must prevent the masked target from reappearing and reconstruct the occluded background with structural and contextual fidelity, rather than merely filling a hole plausibly. Recent dataset-free approaches manipulate the diffusion model's internal self-attention to prevent it from referencing the masked region, yet they fail in two critical ways: (i) they treat the masked region as the sole foreground, misinterpreting non-target objects as background and regenerating them, and (ii) they apply uniform attention constraints without distinguishing diverse background subtypes, leading to textural blurring and structural misalignment. Both failures stem from the absence of explicit background-aware reasoning. We propose EraseLoRA, a dataset-free framework that replaces attention surgery with background-aware reasoning and test-time adaptation. The first stage, Background-aware Foreground Exclusion (BFE), leverages a multimodal large-language model to separate target foreground, non-target foregrounds, and clean background from a single image-mask pair. The second stage, Background-aware Reconstruction with Subtype Aggregation (BRSA), performs test-time optimization that treats inferred background subtypes as complementary pieces, enforcing their consistent integration through reconstruction and alignment objectives without explicit attention intervention. As a model-agnostic plug-in applicable to diverse diffusion backbones, EraseLoRA reconstructs backgrounds at least 23% more faithful to the original scene than previous dataset-free methods while nearly halving unwanted foreground re-generation, and surpasses all dataset-driven approaches in both aspects despite requiring no training data. Code is available at https://shjo-april.github.io/EraseLoRA.
Sanghyun Jo, Donghwan Lee, Eunji Jung +2
May 15, 2026cs.LG

Differentiable Mixture-of-Agents Incentivizes Swarm Intelligence of Large Language Models

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have catalyzed the development of multi-agent systems (MAS) for complex reasoning tasks. However, existing MAS typically rely on pre-defined or pre-compiled communication topologies, which limits their flexibility and adaptability to dynamic task requirements. In this work, we propose Differentiable Mixture-of-Agents (DMoA), a self-evolving multi-agent framework that enables elastic and adaptive agent collaboration during inference. Instead of statically constructing workflows, DMoA dynamically routes and activates agents at each reasoning step, allowing the system to implicitly simulate diverse communication topologies and adapt to evolving demands. To achieve this, we design a differentiable, context-aware routing mechanism that leverages recurrent structures to incorporate historical and contextual information, producing sparse agent activations in a step-wise manner. Furthermore, we introduce predictive entropy as self-supervised signals to optimize the routing process, enabling efficient test-time adaptation without external annotations. Extensive experiments across 9 benchmarks demonstrate that DMoA achieves state-of-the-art performance while exhibiting strong efficiency, robustness, and ensembling capabilities.
Xingjian Wu, Junkai Lu, Siyu Yan +4
Aug 31, 2026cs.AI

Augmenting Human Performance with an XR Agent Learning from Online Behavior and BCI Evidence

We present OLIVE, a framework for adapting a foundation model to provide real-time assistance in temporally demanding, high-stakes, and dynamic tasks. We show that passive EEG, fused online with behavioral evidence, can meaningfully extend the number of targets users detect and engage beyond their unaided action bandwidth. OLIVE learns from both explicit behavioral signals (the targets the user shoots down in an XR first-person shooter game) and implicit physiological signals (fixation-locked EEG) to provide timely guidance, continuously adapting a frozen vision-language model's inference on which items are task-relevant by jointly estimating per-source reliability without manual labels or offline training. Through three user studies, including two live deployments of an assistive agent driven by OLIVE in XR, we show that OLIVE Pareto-dominates prior test-time adaptation frameworks, achieving the highest convergence rate at comparable convergence speed. Combining implicit physiological and explicit behavioral signals, the OLIVE agent produces the largest and most reliable within-session improvement to a user's ability to detect and engage targets, largely independent of the individual's skill. When the target switches silently, the agent that uses both behavioral and physiological signals reconverges significantly faster than the behavior-only agent (1.27 times faster on average, p = .008), restoring trustworthy guidance at the moment the task changes, precisely when reliable assistance matters most.
Ziheng Li, Xichen He, Haoyan Chen +10
Aug 3, 2026cs.CV

Test Time Adaptation Methods for Point Cloud Registration in Laparoscopic Surgery

3D point cloud registration in laparoscopic surgery estimates the transformation between an intraoperative organ reconstructed from video and its preoperative mesh. Because ground-truth transformations are unavailable for real data, supervised networks are trained on synthetic organ pairs. At test time, real reconstructions differ from synthetic data and are noisy, sparse, and occluded, which degrades correspondence estimation. Test-time adaptation (TTA) can reduce this domain shift, but existing methods mainly rely on logits, entropy, class prototypes, or cache memories unavailable in registration. Registration also involves paired inputs with an asymmetric shift that primarily affects the intraoperative cloud. We analyse and modify state-of-the-art TTA methods from three families to 3D registration: model, normalization, and input adaptation. We analyze four representative approaches based on auxiliary-task model updates, backpropagation-free token purging, feature alignment, and layer-normalization calibration. We modify them to handle asymmetric shifts between preoperative and intraoperative point clouds and replace classification-based entropy objectives. Using a correspondence-based model trained on clean synthetic source data, we evaluate adaptation to corrupted synthetic and real target data on P2P and P2ILReg. For synthetic targets, we apply eight corruptions, including uniform noise and global density reduction, at five severity levels. All methods improve registration on P2P, whereas on P2ILReg only input adaptation reduces the error, while normalization adaptation degrades it. Considering the computational overhead of backpropagation-based adaptation, input adaptation is the most promising option for laparoscopic surgery, providing low inference latency and consistent error reductions across datasets. Code: https://github.com/ninaa-git/survey_pc_registration_tta
Nina Bodelot, Soufiane Belharbi, Eric Granger
Sep 15, 2026cs.AI

Interactive Memory Learning for Long-Term Conversations

Recent advancements in large language models have significantly enhanced the capabilities of agents in modeling long-term conversations. Despite these successes, existing approaches typically adopt a static heuristic paradigm, where information is passively archived without adaptive memory valuation. Consequently, these methods fail to self-evolve or align their memory management with evolving user needs. To address this, we propose ICML (InteraCtive Memory Learning), a multi-agent framework that transforms the memory mechanism from a passive archive into a learnable, interactive memory policy. Specifically, we first employ a session synthesis pipeline to generate expert data, facilitating rapid test-time adaptation in unseen scenarios. Building on this, ICML utilizes an online reinforcement learning mechanism where a Planner agent selectively encodes high-value information and a Trigger agent dynamically retrieves it to optimize response quality, whereby the two agents co-evolve through continuous interaction feedback. Crucially, both agents are synchronized through a delayed reward mechanism that propagates future feedback back to earlier storage decisions, ensuring memory policies are precisely aligned with user expectations. Experimental results demonstrate that ICML significantly outperforms strong baselines, exhibiting the unique capability to continuously improve response quality as interactions accumulate.
Cai Ke, Jiangyue Yan, Han Zhang +5
Jun 24, 2025cs.CV

When Distillation Breaks Motion Control: Restoring Generative Trajectories for Fast Video Generators

Training-free motion customization imposes motion patterns from reference videos onto video generators through test-time computation. Most existing methods target full diffusion models, requiring many denoising steps and high computational cost. With the rise of efficient distilled models, a natural question arises: can test-time motion customization be applied directly to distilled generators with their accelerated sampling and efficiency gains? However, our analysis reveals that existing training-free techniques fail on distilled models. Distillation fundamentally alters the denoising dynamics that prior test-time guidance relies on, and the large denoising steps of distilled generators discard the dense intermediate states that score guidance requires, rendering existing motion control strategies incompatible with fast generation. To address this limitation, we propose MotionEcho, a novel training-free test-time distillation framework that enables motion customization for distilled video generators. The key idea is to correct the student model's sampling trajectory with restricted usage of a high-quality diffusion teacher at inference time. Teacher supervises the student's denoising by re-noising the student's endpoint onto its dense trajectory to form a motion-aligned clean endpoint, then interpolating it with the student's, while an adaptive scheduling mechanism determines when and how much teacher guidance is needed. As a result, MotionEcho restores generative trajectories for distilled video generators via lightweight, adaptive test-time teacher guidance, enabling accurate motion control without compromising generation efficiency. Extensive experiments on multiple distilled video generation models demonstrate that our method significantly improves motion fidelity and visual quality while retaining the efficiency advantages of distilled generation.
Jintao Rong, Xin Xie, Xinyi Yu +4
Jul 9, 2025eess.IV

Fast Equivariant Imaging: Accelerating Unsupervised Learning and Model Adaptation via Inexact Splitting

In this work, we propose Fast Equivariant Imaging (FEI), a novel unsupervised learning framework to rapidly and efficiently train deep imaging networks without ground-truth data. FEI reformulates the EI objective through an inexact variable-splitting scheme, decoupling network training from an auxiliary restoration step implemented with a plug-and-play denoiser, this novel unsupervised scheme shows superior efficiency and performance compared to the standard Equivariant Imaging paradigm. In particular, our FEI schemes achieve an order-of-magnitude (10x) acceleration over standard EI on training U-Net for X-ray CT reconstruction and image inpainting, with improved generalization performance. Beyond offline training, the proposed scheme also enables efficient test-time adaptation of a pretrained model to individual samples, to secure further performance improvements. Extensive experiments show that the proposed approach provides a noticeable efficiency and performance gain over existing unsupervised methods and model adaptation techniques.
Guixian Xu, Jinglai Li, Junqi Tang
Aug 31, 2026cs.LG

Safin-1: Safety from Within through Memory-Native State Evolution

Long-horizon complex tasks require foundation models to accumulate information, maintain internal states, and adapt over extended interactions. Safety should be an intrinsic property of the model itself, rather than a behavioral constraint relying solely on external safeguards or post-hoc alignment such as supervised fine-tuning. This motivates Safety from Within, where safety-relevant capabilities are represented and invoked through the model's native computation. We present Safin-1, a family of foundation models realizing this principle through memory routing and state evolution. Safin-1 is built on Memory-Anchor Routing across Context History (MARCH), a network architecture that maintains structured memory states and selectively retrieves relevant historical information through content-conditioned routing. It supports test-time adaptation of persistent capability states without repeatedly modifying the backbone, enabling controlled specialization over a shared foundation. We investigate this interface on downstream safety tasks through a Safety State, demonstrating effective state-based adaptation with substantial safety improvements. More broadly, the routed-state interface unifies contextual memory and persistent capability adaptation within the model's native computation, reframing memory from a passive record of prior context into an active substrate for maintaining and evolving model behavior. Evaluations across general capabilities, long-context understanding, retrieval, and efficiency further validate Safin-1. These findings provide a path toward safety as a state-native and adaptively maintainable capability. This work is only an initial architectural exploration of Safety from Within, and substantial further work is needed to realize this broader vision.
Ming Zhang, Kaisen Yang, Shu Yu +15
May 31, 2026cs.CV

Adaptive Dense Evidence Refinement for Video Relational Reasoning for VRR-QA Challenge

VRR-QA evaluates whether video-language systems can infer spatial, temporal, viewpoint, depth, and visibility relations that are not always resolved by a single frame. We present an inference-only system built around adaptive test-time computation. The system first answers each question with a direct video-language model pass, then uses multiple lightweight views to find unstable questions. Only these difficult questions are routed to a high-budget dense evidence module that constructs timestamped frame observations, relation-specific probes, candidate verification, and conservative temporal aggregation. This design separates two problems that are often confused in video question answering: finding plausible alternative answers and deciding when a current answer should actually be changed. On the test split, the final system obtains 90.07 average accuracy and 87.81 macro average accuracy. The report focuses on the final test system and the implementation settings required to reproduce the adaptive dense verifier.
Yuyang Sun, Yongliang Wu, Xingyu Zhu +8
May 23, 2026cs.AI

Benchmarking the Limits of In-Context Reinforcement Learning for Ad-Hoc Teamwork

In-Context Reinforcement Learning (ICRL) has enabled foundation agents to adapt instantaneously to novel tasks, yet its efficacy in Ad-Hoc Teamwork (AHT)-where coordination with unknown partners is required-remains unexplored. To rigorously evaluate this, we introduce a large-scale benchmark ICRL4AHT, built upon a high-throughput JAX implementation of Overcooked-V2. Our benchmark includes a large, diverse teammate suite spanning both RL and heuristic policies, enabling controlled train-test shifts, and provides a reproducible end-to-end pipeline for teammate generation, learning-history collection, dataset construction, and online multi-episode evaluation. We evaluate representative history-conditioned ICRL algorithms, including Algorithm Distillation (AD) and Decision-Pretrained Transformer (DPT), across millions of transitions. Results reveal notable limitations: contrary to their success in single-agent domains, these baselines fail to exhibit robust test-time adaptation in multi-agent settings. Specifically, these methods frequently underperform random baselines across both unseen teammate and unseen layout tracks, with no clear in-context improvement over long horizons. These findings highlight the challenges of strategic inference under partial observability within the OvercookedV2 AHT protocol, establishing our benchmark as a critical testbed for next-generation coordination algorithms.
Yuheng Jing, Kai Li, Ziwen Zhang +8
May 14, 2026cs.LG

FutureSim: Replaying World Events to Evaluate Adaptive Agents

AI agents are being increasingly deployed in dynamic, open-ended environments that require adapting to new information as it arrives. To efficiently measure this capability for realistic use-cases, we propose building grounded simulations that replay real-world events in the order they occurred. We build FutureSim, where agents forecast world events beyond their knowledge cutoff while interacting with a chronological replay of the world: real news articles arriving and questions resolving over the simulated period. We evaluate frontier agents in their native harness, testing their ability to predict world events over a three-month period from January to March 2026. FutureSim reveals a clear separation in their capabilities, with the best agent's accuracy being 25%, and many having worse Brier skill score than making no prediction at all. Through careful ablations, we show how FutureSim offers a realistic setting to study emerging research directions like long-horizon test-time adaptation, search, memory, and reasoning about uncertainty. Overall, we hope our benchmark design paves the way to measure AI progress on open-ended adaptation spanning long time-horizons in the real world.
Shashwat Goel, Nikhil Chandak, Arvindh Arun +5
Aug 5, 2026cs.CV

Visual Anchoring in Diffusion: Multimodal Zero-Shot Skeleton Action Recognition

Zero-shot Skeleton Action Recognition (ZSAR) remains ambiguous when unseen actions share similar skeleton joint dynamics but differ in objects or scene context. RGB provides these missing cues, yet existing multimodal methods typically maintain independent skeleton and RGB scoring branches and fuse their outputs. Without using unlabeled test data for adaptation or fusion calibration, a fixed fusion weight cannot capture class-pair-dependent modality reliability, while an adaptive rule lacks target-side feedback for deciding which branch should dominate. We bypass this weight-selection problem via the classify-by-generation paradigm, where each class is scored by how accurately a text-conditioned denoiser predicts the noise added to the skeleton feature. This formulation separates the progressively corrupted skeleton from fixed conditioning, allowing RGB and text to jointly condition a single class-scoring function rather than produce independent scores. We instantiate this idea as Multimodal Triplet Diffusion for Skeleton-Text Matching (TDSM-MM), augmenting a text-conditioned denoising Transformer with a non-diffused RGB condition token that serves as a stable visual anchor during skeleton data reconstruction. Our proposed TDSM-MM has been ablated via extensive experiments and achieved the best inductive accuracy on three of four NTU-60/120 splits and surpasses the transductive state-of-the-art on NTU-120 96/24 (i.e., 71.3% vs. 69.1%), without test-time adaptation, suggesting that diffusion-based methods can be a promising direction for zero-shot learning.
Zehao Bao, Shujun Guo, Bruce X. B. Yu
May 7, 2026cs.LG

Same Signal, Opposite Meaning: Direction-Informed Adaptive Learning for LLM Agents

Adaptive test-time compute for LLM agents aims to invoke extra computation only when it improves performance. Existing methods typically use confidence-, uncertainty-, or difficulty-based gates, assuming a fixed direction from the gating signal through compute need to the value of computation. This makes gating a utility-calibration problem: gating signals should align with whether extra computation improves the final outcome over the base policy. We show that this alignment is unstable: the same signal predicts rollout benefit in one setting and rollout harm in another, with reversals across environments and backbones even when the task is fixed. Wrong-direction gates can therefore worsen performance by precisely selecting harmful states. This reversal reflects a deeper distinction between compute need and compute suitability: a high uncertainty signal may indicate decision-difficult states where rollouts help compare alternatives, or intervention-unsuitable states where the current context does not support useful rollout-based improvement. Under this two-source model, fixed-direction gates are unreliable across heterogeneous settings. To address this, we propose DIAL (Direction-Informed Adaptive Learning), a sparse gate trained from signal-agnostic counterfactual exploration to learn the utility direction of state features per (environment, backbone). Across six environments and three backbones, DIAL yields a stronger overall success-cost trade-off than fixed-direction baselines.
Ziming Li, Jiatan Huang, Xiaoguang Guo +2