RTTC: Reward-Guided Collaborative Test-Time Compute

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Muñoz, J. Pablo, Yuan, Jinjie
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912537179586560
author Muñoz, J. Pablo
Yuan, Jinjie
author_facet Muñoz, J. Pablo
Yuan, Jinjie
contents Test-Time Compute (TTC) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) at inference, leveraging strategies such as Test-Time Training (TTT) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). However, the optimal adaptation strategy varies across queries, and indiscriminate application of TTC strategy incurs substantial computational overhead. In this work, we introduce Reward-Guided Test-Time Compute (RTTC), a novel framework that adaptively selects the most effective TTC strategy for each query via a pretrained reward model, maximizing downstream accuracy across diverse domains and tasks. RTTC operates in a distributed server-client architecture, retrieving relevant samples from a remote knowledge base and applying RAG or lightweight fine-tuning on client devices only when necessary. To further mitigate redundant computation, we propose Query-State Caching, which enables the efficient reuse of historical query states at both retrieval and adaptation levels. Extensive experiments across multiple LLMs and benchmarks demonstrate that RTTC consistently achieves superior accuracy compared to vanilla RAG or TTT, validating the necessity of adaptive, reward-guided TTC selection and the potential of RTTC for scalable, high-performance language model adaptation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_10024
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RTTC: Reward-Guided Collaborative Test-Time Compute
Muñoz, J. Pablo
Yuan, Jinjie
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
I.2.0
Test-Time Compute (TTC) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) at inference, leveraging strategies such as Test-Time Training (TTT) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). However, the optimal adaptation strategy varies across queries, and indiscriminate application of TTC strategy incurs substantial computational overhead. In this work, we introduce Reward-Guided Test-Time Compute (RTTC), a novel framework that adaptively selects the most effective TTC strategy for each query via a pretrained reward model, maximizing downstream accuracy across diverse domains and tasks. RTTC operates in a distributed server-client architecture, retrieving relevant samples from a remote knowledge base and applying RAG or lightweight fine-tuning on client devices only when necessary. To further mitigate redundant computation, we propose Query-State Caching, which enables the efficient reuse of historical query states at both retrieval and adaptation levels. Extensive experiments across multiple LLMs and benchmarks demonstrate that RTTC consistently achieves superior accuracy compared to vanilla RAG or TTT, validating the necessity of adaptive, reward-guided TTC selection and the potential of RTTC for scalable, high-performance language model adaptation.
title RTTC: Reward-Guided Collaborative Test-Time Compute
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
I.2.0
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10024