2025 ACL ACL 2025

Learning to Reason from Feedback at Test-Time

Abstract

AbstractSolving complex tasks in a single attempt is challenging for large language models (LLMs). Iterative interaction with the environment and feedback is often required to achieve success, making effective feedback utilization a critical topic. Existing approaches either struggle with length generalization or rely on naive retries without leveraging prior information. In this paper, we introduce FTTT, a novel paradigm that formulates feedback utilization as an optimization problem at test time. Additionally, we propose a learnable test-time optimizer, OpTune, to effectively exploit feedback. Experiments on two LLMs across four reasoning datasets demonstrate that FTTT and OpTune achieve superior scalability and performance.

🌉 Interdisciplinary Bridge — Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing
🧭 Keyword Pioneer — feedback utilization
🐝 Cross-Pollinator — Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Data Science & Analytics, Deep Learning, Healthcare & Medicine, Interdisciplinary, Knowledge & Reasoning, Machine Learning, Mathematics & Optimization, Natural Language Processing, Reinforcement Learning, Speech & Audio