As machine learning transitions increasingly towards real world applications controlling the test-time cost of algorithms becomes more and more crucial. Recent work, such as the Greedy Miser and Speedboost, incorporate test-time budget constraints into the training procedure and learn classifiers that provably stay wit…
New method optimizes language model performance for test-time strategies.
problem Mismatch between training objectives and test-time deployment of large language models.
method Tail-Extrapolated estimators to approximate best-of-N performance from limited training rollouts.
result Improved performance of best-of-N deployment across various models and datasets.
New method predicts and optimizes test-time scaling for LLMs.
problem Lack of principled guidance on scaling LLMs efficiently.
method Tail-guided search to predict and allocate compute.
result SLG Search achieves higher rewards with less compute.
Best-of-∞ improves LLM performance by efficiently allocating inference-time computation.
problem Achieving optimal performance in test-time LLM ensembling with infinite budget.
method Adaptive generation scheme and weighted ensembles of LLMs, formulated as mixed-integer linear program.
result Optimal ensemble weighting improves performance over individual models.
We propose a generic and interpretable learning framework for building robust text classification model that achieves accuracy comparable to full models under test-time budget constraints. Our approach learns a selector to identify words that are relevant to the prediction tasks and passes them to the classifier for pr…
CPATTA uses conformal prediction for efficient test-time adaptation.
problem Low data selection efficiency in existing ATTA methods.
method Conformal Prediction, online weight-update algorithm, domain-shift detector, staged update scheme.
result CPATTA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 5% in accuracy.
Recently, machine learning algorithms have successfully entered large-scale real-world industrial applications (e.g. search engines and email spam filters). Here, the CPU cost during test time must be budgeted and accounted for. In this paper, we address the challenge of balancing the test-time cost and the classifier …
New scaling laws optimize model size, training, and inference for better performance.
problem Trade-off between model size and inference cost in modern LLMs.
method Train-to-Test (T2) scaling laws that jointly optimize model size, training tokens, and inference samples. result Optimal pretraining decisions shift into overtraining regime, leading to stronger performance.
We study the problem of structured prediction under test-time budget constraints. We propose a novel approach applicable to a wide range of structured prediction problems in computer vision and natural language processing. Our approach seeks to adaptively generate computationally costly features during test-time in ord…
Duel-Evolve uses LLM self-preferences for test-time optimization of discrete outputs.
problem Optimizing LLM outputs at test time with limited or unreliable scalar rewards.
method Duel-Evolve uses pairwise comparisons from the LLM to guide optimization, aggregating them via a Bayesian Bradley-Terry model.
result Achieves significant improvement over existing methods in accuracy.
We propose a novel adaptive approximation approach for test-time resource-constrained prediction. Given an input instance at test-time, a gating function identifies a prediction model for the input among a collection of models. Our objective is to minimize overall average cost without sacrificing accuracy. We learn gat…
DSI improves tail-risk estimation in generative models by averaging checkpoints.
problem Generative models' instability in rare adverse scenarios.
method Diachronic Sample Integration (DSI) ensembles generated samples across checkpoints.
result DSI reduces tail-estimation error compared to single-checkpoint baselines.
Path-independent equilibrium models improve network performance on harder problems.
problem Improving network performance on harder problem instances.
method Investigated path-independent equilibrium models and their impact on network performance.
result Path independence correlates with better performance on harder problem instances.
LLMs optimize quantum circuits by iteratively improving proposals with feedback and memory traces.
problem Optimizing quantum circuits using large language models (LLMs) under black-box evaluation.
method Closed-loop, test-time optimization with LLMs, score-difference feedback, and restart-from-the-best sampling.
result The approach improves circuit synthesis performance and success rate, especially for larger qubit settings.
As machine learning algorithms enter applications in industrial settings, there is increased interest in controlling their cpu-time during testing. The cpu-time consists of the running time of the algorithm and the extraction time of the features. The latter can vary drastically when the feature set is diverse. In this…
RG-TTA adapts neural forecasters to streaming time series shifts by modulating adaptation intensity.
problem Adapting neural forecasters to distribution shifts in streaming time series data.
method RG-TTA uses a meta-controller that continuously modulates adaptation intensity based on distributional similarity.
result RG-TTA achieves the lowest MSE in 156 of 224 seed-averaged experiments, reducing MSE by 5.7% vs TTA.
Deep neural network (DNN) based approaches hold significant potential for reinforcement learning (RL) and have already shown remarkable gains over state-of-art methods in a number of applications. The effectiveness of DNN methods can be attributed to leveraging the abundance of supervised data to learn value functions,…
We propose doubly nested network(DNNet) where all neurons represent their own sub-models that solve the same task. Every sub-model is nested both layer-wise and channel-wise. While nesting sub-models layer-wise is straight-forward with deep-supervision as proposed in \cite{xie2015holistically}, channel-wise nesting has…
Simple policy search outperforms advanced learnable test-time augmentation techniques.
problem Improving predictive performance through test-time data augmentation.
method Greedy policy search (GPS) for learning test-time augmentation policies.
result Augmentation policies learned with GPS achieve superior predictive performance and robustness.
We present a dynamic model selection approach for resource-constrained prediction. Given an input instance at test-time, a gating function identifies a prediction model for the input among a collection of models. Our objective is to minimize overall average cost without sacrificing accuracy. We learn gating and predict…
This paper improves test-time adaptation for distribution shifts using confidence maximization and input transformation.
problem Improving deep networks' performance on data shifted from the training distribution.
method Proposes a novel loss function combining confidence maximization and batch-wise entropy maximization with an input transformation module.
result Significantly improves robustness of pretrained networks to corruptions on benchmarks like ImageNet-C.
Study improves understanding of why agentic theorem provers succeed.
problem Understanding which components of agentic theorem provers improve proof success.
method Statistical provability theory and finite-horizon reachability MDP model.
result Bounds provability gap and explains components' effectiveness.
A probabilistic framework for online test-time adaptation
problem Adapting models to new data under distributional shift
method State-space modelling architecture
result Characterizing parameter learning, time evolution, prior tuning, and prediction
QAlign improves language model alignment with less compute, outperforming existing methods.
problem Improving language model performance with limited test-time computation.
method QAlign: sampling from optimal aligned distribution using Markov chain Monte Carlo.
result Consistent improvements over existing methods on various benchmarks.
Risk monitoring detects when TTA models degrade at test time.
problem Detecting when TTA models degrade at test time.
method Extended risk monitoring tools based on sequential testing with confidence sequences.
result Demonstrated effectiveness of TTA monitoring framework across various datasets and methods.
Generative Flow Networks solve shortest path problems in graphs.
problem Finding shortest paths in graphs.
method Generative Flow Networks with flow regularization.
result Training a GFlowNet can solve pathfinding problems in arbitrary graphs.
The study examines how extra compute during testing affects the performance of large language models.
problem Understanding the conditions under which test-time scaling improves model performance.
method An in-context weight prediction task for linear regression was used to train transformers. The performance was analyzed under varying levels of test-time compute.
result Training transformers on diverse, relevant, and hard tasks leads to the best performance for test-time scaling.
This work explores test-time scaling strategies for LLMs, improving sample efficiency and expressiveness.
problem Understanding the sample efficiency and expressiveness of test-time scaling strategies for LLMs.
method Established separation and expressiveness results for self-consistency, best-of-n, and self-correction strategies. result Self-correction enables Transformers to simulate online learning over multiple tasks without prior knowledge.
Implicit models can match or exceed explicit models with more test-time compute.
problem Understanding the expressive power and scaling of implicit models.
method Nonparametric analysis of expressive power, mathematical characterization of implicit operators, and test-time scaling experiments.
result Implicit models can progressively express more complex mappings through iteration, matching a richer function class with test-time compute.
The study examines how verifier imperfections impact test-time scaling techniques.
problem Understanding how verifier imperfections affect test-time scaling methods.
method Proves the instance-level accuracy of Best-of-N and Rejection Sampling methods using the geometry of the verifier's ROC curve.
result RS outperforms BoN for fixed compute, but both converge to the same accuracy in the infinite-compute limit.
We show that several popular few-shot learning benchmarks can be solved with varying degrees of success without using support set Labels at Test-time (LT). To this end, we introduce a new baseline called Centroid Networks, a modification of Prototypical Networks in which the support set labels are hidden from the metho…
Paper examines test-time smoothing defenses against adversarial examples.
problem Adversarial examples can mislead neural networks, compromising robustness.
method Evaluates various test-time smoothing defenses on ImageNet.
result Non-monotonic relation between attacks and defenses, large variance among samples.
VCoTTA uses variational Bayesian methods to adapt models under continuous domain shifts.
problem Error accumulation in continual test-time adaptation.
method VCoTTA employs variational Bayesian techniques to update a Bayesian Neural Network (BNN) during testing, combining priors from source and teacher models.
result VCoTTA effectively mitigates error accumulation in CTTA, as shown by experimental results on three datasets.
Paper tackles test-time adaptation for tabular data.
problem Performance degradation due to distribution shifts in testing.
method Proposes FTAT for robustly adapting tabular models during testing.
result FTAT outperforms state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets.
EviTrack improves sequential prediction in delayed disambiguation scenarios.
problem Challenges in sequential prediction with delayed disambiguation where early observations are ambiguous.
method EviTrack operates over latent trajectories, applying evidence- and likelihood-ratio-based selection to delay commitment until supported by data.
result EviTrack outperforms sampling-based baselines in a controlled synthetic benchmark, achieving faster post-disambiguation recovery.
Improves model performance with unlabeled test data.
problem Improving model robustness to distribution shifts.
method Self-supervised learning using a single unlabeled test sample.
result Improves performance on diverse image classification benchmarks.
This paper addresses detection of a reverse engineering (RE) attack targeting a deep neural network (DNN) image classifier; by querying, RE's aim is to discover the classifier's decision rule. RE can enable test-time evasion attacks, which require knowledge of the classifier. Recently, we proposed a quite effective app…
The abstract explores connections between reinforcement learning, scaling, and diffusion.
problem Aligning reinforcement learning with human feedback and scaling techniques.
method Clarifying connections between reinforcement learning, scaling, and diffusion.
result Introducing a resampling approach for alignment and reward-directed diffusion models.
Machine learning models are often used at test-time subject to constraints and trade-offs not present at training-time. For example, a computer vision model operating on an embedded device may need to perform real-time inference, or a translation model operating on a cell phone may wish to bound its average compute tim…
Enhances image quality to improve test-time adaptation accuracy.
problem Reducing accuracy loss due to distribution shift in deep networks.
method Integrates image enhancement with TTA methods to reduce prediction uncertainty.
result TECA method increases accuracy of TTA methods without hyperparameters.
A new approach for test-time adaptation detects and reacts to distribution shifts.
problem Improving test-time accuracy under distribution shifts.
method Online self-training with a detection tool based on entropy values and betting martingales.
result The classifier's entropy values match those of the source domain, building invariance to distribution shifts.
We study the problem of reducing test-time acquisition costs in classification systems. Our goal is to learn decision rules that adaptively select sensors for each example as necessary to make a confident prediction. We model our system as a directed acyclic graph (DAG) where internal nodes correspond to sensor subsets…
DAD++ improves test-time adversarial defense without access to training data.
problem Improving adversarial robustness of pre-trained models without access to training data.
method Test-time Data-free Adversarial Defense (DAD++) with detection and correction schemes.
result DAD++ significantly improves adversarial robustness with minimal clean accuracy drop.
Tent adapts models during testing by minimizing entropy of predictions.
problem Adapting models to new data during testing with limited information.
method Test entropy minimization (tent) and online channel-wise affine transformations.
result Reduces generalization error on various datasets and benchmarks.
VT-DIS improves sampling from Boltzmann distributions with minimal overhead.
problem Bias in Monte Carlo estimates from score-based diffusion models.
method Variance-Tuned Diffusion Importance Sampling (VT-DIS) adapts noise covariance to correct bias.
result VT-DIS achieves effective sample sizes of 80%, 35%, and 3.5% on benchmarks, using less computational budget.
Adapts CNN for robust medical image segmentation across different scanners and protocols.
problem Performance degradation of CNNs in medical image segmentation due to mismatch between training and test images.
method Designs a segmentation CNN as a concatenation of a shallow normalization CNN and a deep CNN. At test time, adapts the normalization sub-network for each test image using a denoising autoencoder.
result Consistently improves performance on multi-center MRI datasets of brain, heart, and prostate.
Unified framework for sequence models using test-time regression.
problem Designing efficient sequence models with associative memory.
method Formalizing associative recall as regression over input tokens, deriving various sequence models.
result Clarifies the effectiveness of query-key normalization in softmax attention and offers new generalizations.
Method adapts frozen models for few-shot tasks without training.
problem Deployment constraints limit model updates, necessitating new adaptation methods.
method Exponential tilting of latent distribution for inference.
result Method outperforms parameter-update methods across benchmarks.