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SR-TTT: Surprisal-Aware Residual Test-Time Training

Machine Learning 2026-03-10 v1 Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language

Abstract

Test-Time Training (TTT) language models achieve theoretically infinite context windows with an O(1) memory footprint by replacing the standard exact-attention KV-cache with hidden state ``fast weights'' W_fast updated via self-supervised learning during inference. However, pure TTT architectures suffer catastrophic failures on exact-recall tasks (e.g., Needle-in-a-Haystack). Because the fast weights aggressively compress the context into an information bottleneck, highly surprising or unique tokens are rapidly overwritten and forgotten by subsequent token gradient updates. We introduce SR-TTT (Surprisal-Aware Residual Test-Time Training), which resolves this recall failure by augmenting the TTT backbone with a loss-gated sparse memory mechanism. By dynamically routing only incompressible, highly surprising tokens to a traditional exact-attention Residual Cache, SR-TTT preserves O(1) memory for low-entropy background context while utilizing exact attention exclusively for critical needles. Our complete implementation, training scripts, and pre-trained weights are open-source and available at: https://github.com/swamynathanvp/Surprisal-Aware-Residual-Test-Time-Training.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.06642,
  title  = {SR-TTT: Surprisal-Aware Residual Test-Time Training},
  author = {Swamynathan V P},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.06642},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

7 pages, 5 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:07:35.468Z