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In-Place Test-Time Training

4 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

4 Pith papers citing it
abstract

The static ``train then deploy" paradigm fundamentally limits Large Language Models (LLMs) from dynamically adapting their weights in response to continuous streams of new information inherent in real-world tasks. Test-Time Training (TTT) offers a compelling alternative by updating a subset of model parameters (fast weights) at inference time, yet its potential in the current LLM ecosystem is hindered by critical barriers including architectural incompatibility, computational inefficiency and misaligned fast weight objectives for language modeling. In this work, we introduce In-Place Test-Time Training (In-Place TTT), a framework that seamlessly endows LLMs with Test-Time Training ability. In-Place TTT treats the final projection matrix of the ubiquitous MLP blocks as its adaptable fast weights, enabling a ``drop-in" enhancement for LLMs without costly retraining from scratch. Furthermore, we replace TTT's generic reconstruction objective with a tailored, theoretically-grounded objective explicitly aligned with the Next-Token-Prediction task governing autoregressive language modeling. This principled objective, combined with an efficient chunk-wise update mechanism, results in a highly scalable algorithm compatible with context parallelism. Extensive experiments validate our framework's effectiveness: as an in-place enhancement, it enables a 4B-parameter model to achieve superior performance on tasks with contexts up to 128k, and when pretrained from scratch, it consistently outperforms competitive TTT-related approaches. Ablation study results further provide deeper insights on our design choices. Collectively, our results establish In-Place TTT as a promising step towards a paradigm of continual learning in LLMs.

fields

cs.CL 3 cs.LG 1

years

2026 4

representative citing papers

When Does Continual Learning Require Learning

cs.LG · 2026-07-08 · conditional · novelty 6.0

Different patterns of environmental change (space vs time) require different LLM update behaviors; no single family of methods—prompts, distillation, RL, or compression—handles all regimes.

Test-Time Training with Next-Token Prediction

cs.CL · 2026-06-19 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

TTT-NTP adapts pretrained LLMs at test time by training fast weights to match next-position hidden states from the forward pass, yielding consistent gains on long-context benchmarks across Llama, Mistral, and Qwen models.

citing papers explorer

Showing 4 of 4 citing papers.

  • Query-Conditioned Test-Time Self-Training for Large Language Models cs.CL · 2026-05-13 · conditional · none · ref 3 · 2 links · internal anchor

    QueST adapts LLMs at test time by generating query-specific problem-solution pairs for self-supervised fine-tuning, improving reasoning performance without external data.

  • When Does Continual Learning Require Learning cs.LG · 2026-07-08 · conditional · none · ref 11 · internal anchor

    Different patterns of environmental change (space vs time) require different LLM update behaviors; no single family of methods—prompts, distillation, RL, or compression—handles all regimes.

  • Test-Time Training with Next-Token Prediction cs.CL · 2026-06-19 · unverdicted · none · ref 9 · internal anchor

    TTT-NTP adapts pretrained LLMs at test time by training fast weights to match next-position hidden states from the forward pass, yielding consistent gains on long-context benchmarks across Llama, Mistral, and Qwen models.

  • EASE-TTT: Evidence-Aligned Selective Test-Time Training for Long-Context Question Answering cs.CL · 2026-06-05 · unverdicted · none · ref 38 · internal anchor

    EASE-TTT creates a soft attention target from evidence chunks to guide query-side test-time adaptation, yielding higher macro-average scores than full-context, retrieval-only, and standard qTTT baselines on six LongBench QA tasks.