English

When to Ponder: Adaptive Compute Allocation for Code Generation via Test-Time Training

Machine Learning 2026-01-06 v1 Computation and Language

Abstract

Large language models apply uniform computation to all inputs, regardless of difficulty. We propose PonderTTT, a gating strategy using the TTT layer's self-supervised reconstruction loss to selectively trigger Test-Time Training (TTT) updates. The gating decision itself is training-free--requiring no learned classifier or auxiliary networks; only a single scalar threshold is initially calibrated on unlabeled data and continuously adapted via EMA to maintain target update rates. Our experiments with GPT-2 models (124M to 1.5B) on code language modeling (The Stack v2, teacher-forced perplexity) demonstrate that this signal is inference-compatible, requiring no ground-truth labels. Our Reconstruction Gating achieves 82-89% Oracle Recovery while being fully training-free, significantly outperforming Random Skip baselines (up to 16% lower loss on OOD languages).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.00894,
  title  = {When to Ponder: Adaptive Compute Allocation for Code Generation via Test-Time Training},
  author = {Gihyeon Sim},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.00894},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

14 pages, 1 figure, 14 tables, code available at https://github.com/deveworld/ponderTTT

R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:48:53.043Z