Efficient Test-Time Finetuning of LLMs via Convex Reconstruction and Gradient Caching

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Khamis, Alaa, Maalouf, Alaa
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Khamis, Alaa
Maalouf, Alaa
author_facet Khamis, Alaa
Maalouf, Alaa
contents Test-time finetuning (TTFT) is a rapidly evolving paradigm that adapts a language model to each prompt by retrieving related sequences, updating the model on them, and then evaluating the prompt. However, TTFT is only practical if it is fast: selection and finetuning both happen per query, making each a direct bottleneck. Existing methods trade speed for quality: fast retrieval is often redundant, while stronger diversity-aware selection adds prohibitive per-query cost. We introduce HullFT, a geometric approach to TTFT that addresses both bottlenecks. Given a query, HullFT first represents the query embedding as a sparse convex combination of few training sequences, using efficient projection-free Frank-Wolfe optimization. This yields a support set that is inherently relevant and diverse. We then convert the fractional convex weights into an exact integer multiset for finetuning through a geometric integerization procedure. The resulting multiplicities naturally create repeated examples, which we exploit with Gradient Reuse to amortize forward-backward computation across repeated finetuning steps. Our experiments show that HullFT improves the quality-efficiency tradeoff over current state-of-the-art TTFT methods, achieving lower bits-per-byte at substantially lower total runtime.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_30337
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publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Efficient Test-Time Finetuning of LLMs via Convex Reconstruction and Gradient Caching
Khamis, Alaa
Maalouf, Alaa
Machine Learning
Test-time finetuning (TTFT) is a rapidly evolving paradigm that adapts a language model to each prompt by retrieving related sequences, updating the model on them, and then evaluating the prompt. However, TTFT is only practical if it is fast: selection and finetuning both happen per query, making each a direct bottleneck. Existing methods trade speed for quality: fast retrieval is often redundant, while stronger diversity-aware selection adds prohibitive per-query cost. We introduce HullFT, a geometric approach to TTFT that addresses both bottlenecks. Given a query, HullFT first represents the query embedding as a sparse convex combination of few training sequences, using efficient projection-free Frank-Wolfe optimization. This yields a support set that is inherently relevant and diverse. We then convert the fractional convex weights into an exact integer multiset for finetuning through a geometric integerization procedure. The resulting multiplicities naturally create repeated examples, which we exploit with Gradient Reuse to amortize forward-backward computation across repeated finetuning steps. Our experiments show that HullFT improves the quality-efficiency tradeoff over current state-of-the-art TTFT methods, achieving lower bits-per-byte at substantially lower total runtime.
title Efficient Test-Time Finetuning of LLMs via Convex Reconstruction and Gradient Caching
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.30337