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Hauptverfasser: Li, Yang, He, Zhiyuan, Huang, Yuxuan, Xiao, Zhuhanling, Yu, Chao, Fang, Meng, Shao, Kun, Wang, Jun
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.23262
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author Li, Yang
He, Zhiyuan
Huang, Yuxuan
Xiao, Zhuhanling
Yu, Chao
Fang, Meng
Shao, Kun
Wang, Jun
author_facet Li, Yang
He, Zhiyuan
Huang, Yuxuan
Xiao, Zhuhanling
Yu, Chao
Fang, Meng
Shao, Kun
Wang, Jun
contents Recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibit strong perceptual reasoning abilities, yet they often struggle to adapt efficiently when encountering novel tasks at test time. In contrast, humans leverage the metacognitive model with memory, enabling continuous strategy refinement through metacognitive control when faced with new challenges. To bridge this gap, we propose metacognitive test-time reasoning (MCTR), a framework that equips models with the ability to learn, adapt, and improve during test time through metacognitive self-updating. Inspired by the dual structure of human metacognition, MCTR comprises meta-level and object-level VLM reasoning modules, each equipped with dedicated memory systems for hierarchical adaptive reasoning. Specifically, MCTR consists of (1) a meta-reasoning module which incrementally builds a structured memory by discovering and storing task-relevant rules, environmental patterns, and action-outcome relationships from test-time observations as natural language descriptions; and (2) an action-reasoning module that determines optimal actions through context-aware perception and strategic reasoning by dynamically retrieving and integrating knowledge from memory. The action-reasoning module continuously updates its policy through proposed metacognitive test-time reinforcement learning, adapting as knowledge memory evolves. We evaluate MCTR on 45 Atari games (33 seen, 12 unseen). MCTR demonstrates robust test-time adaptation, achieving 9/12 top-1 results on unseen games compared with baselines. Analyses through ablations, learning dynamics, and case studies reveal the complementary contributions of both components and show meta-reasoning evolving toward human-like adaptation strategies.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_23262
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Adapting Like Humans: A Metacognitive Agent with Test-time Reasoning
Li, Yang
He, Zhiyuan
Huang, Yuxuan
Xiao, Zhuhanling
Yu, Chao
Fang, Meng
Shao, Kun
Wang, Jun
Artificial Intelligence
Recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibit strong perceptual reasoning abilities, yet they often struggle to adapt efficiently when encountering novel tasks at test time. In contrast, humans leverage the metacognitive model with memory, enabling continuous strategy refinement through metacognitive control when faced with new challenges. To bridge this gap, we propose metacognitive test-time reasoning (MCTR), a framework that equips models with the ability to learn, adapt, and improve during test time through metacognitive self-updating. Inspired by the dual structure of human metacognition, MCTR comprises meta-level and object-level VLM reasoning modules, each equipped with dedicated memory systems for hierarchical adaptive reasoning. Specifically, MCTR consists of (1) a meta-reasoning module which incrementally builds a structured memory by discovering and storing task-relevant rules, environmental patterns, and action-outcome relationships from test-time observations as natural language descriptions; and (2) an action-reasoning module that determines optimal actions through context-aware perception and strategic reasoning by dynamically retrieving and integrating knowledge from memory. The action-reasoning module continuously updates its policy through proposed metacognitive test-time reinforcement learning, adapting as knowledge memory evolves. We evaluate MCTR on 45 Atari games (33 seen, 12 unseen). MCTR demonstrates robust test-time adaptation, achieving 9/12 top-1 results on unseen games compared with baselines. Analyses through ablations, learning dynamics, and case studies reveal the complementary contributions of both components and show meta-reasoning evolving toward human-like adaptation strategies.
title Adapting Like Humans: A Metacognitive Agent with Test-time Reasoning
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.23262