In-Place Test-Time Training

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Feng, Guhao, Luo, Shengjie, Hua, Kai, Zhang, Ge, He, Di, Huang, Wenhao, Cai, Tianle
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Feng, Guhao
Luo, Shengjie
Hua, Kai
Zhang, Ge
He, Di
Huang, Wenhao
Cai, Tianle
author_facet Feng, Guhao
Luo, Shengjie
Hua, Kai
Zhang, Ge
He, Di
Huang, Wenhao
Cai, Tianle
contents 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_06169
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle In-Place Test-Time Training
Feng, Guhao
Luo, Shengjie
Hua, Kai
Zhang, Ge
He, Di
Huang, Wenhao
Cai, Tianle
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
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.
title In-Place Test-Time Training
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.06169