Sharpen Before You Adapt: Data-Free Entry-State Sharpening for Test-Time Reinforcement Learning

Excerpt

arXiv:2610.00903v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Test-time reinforcement learning (TTRL) adapts language models on unlabeled test problems using supervision derived from their own samples. This makes the checkpoint's \emph{entry state} consequential: a diffuse policy provides noisier self-supervision and may spend much of a limited adaptation budget merely concentrating probability mass before reliably expressing capability it already possesses. We propose \textbf{entry-state sharpening}: use dat