English

Test-Time Meta-Adaptation with Self-Synthesis

Machine Learning 2026-03-10 v2 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

As strong general reasoners, large language models (LLMs) encounter diverse domains and tasks, where the ability to adapt and self-improve at test time is valuable. We introduce MASS, a meta-learning framework that enables LLMs to self-adapt by generating problem-specific synthetic training data and performing targeted self-updates optimized for downstream performance at inference time. We train this behavior end-to-end via bilevel optimization: an inner loop adapts on self-generated examples while an outer loop meta-learns data-attribution signals and rewards post-update task performance. The synthetic data is optimized with scalable meta-gradients, backpropagating the downstream loss through the inner updates to reward useful generations. Experiments on mathematical reasoning show that MASS learns to synthesize per-instance curricula that yield effective, data-efficient test-time adaptation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.03524,
  title  = {Test-Time Meta-Adaptation with Self-Synthesis},
  author = {Zeyneb N. Kaya and Nick Rui},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.03524},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

5 pages, 2 figures, 1 table. Accepted to AI with Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) Workshop @ ICLR 2026

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:02:08.147Z