mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

DiSCTT: Consensus-Guided Self-Curriculum for Efficient Test-Time Adaptation in Reasoning

arXiv 2603.05357 ↗First posted 5 Mar 2026cs.CLcited by 2

On the map: LLM reasoning → Test-time compute and efficient thinking

Abstract (arXiv)

Test-time adaptation offers a promising avenue for improving reasoning performance in large language models without additional supervision, but existing approaches often apply a uniform optimization objective across all inputs, leading to inefficient or unstable adaptation on heterogeneous reasoning problems. We propose DiSCTT, a difficulty-aware, consensus-guided self-curriculum framework that dynamically allocates test-time optimization strategies based on instance-level epistemic uncertainty estimated from agreement among sampled reasoning trajectories. Inputs with high consensus are consolidated via supervised fine-tuning using majority-agreed solutions as pseudo-labels, while low-consensus inputs are optimized via reinforcement learning with a consensus-regularized objective that encourages diversity under relevance constraints. Across a broad suite of mathematical and general reasoning benchmarks, DiSCTT consistently outperforms strong test-time adaptation baselines, achieving higher accuracy with reduced variance and substantially lower computation and wall-clock training times. These results demonstrate that explicitly accounting for instance difficulty and uncertainty enables more stable, efficient, and effective test-time adaptation for reasoning models.

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Test-time compute and efficient thinking, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 9 of its 12 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 5 Mar 2026.

Builds on

9 of 12 references.

References · 9

  1. 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,712
  2. 2022Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 12,302
  3. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 8,851
  4. 2022Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Modelscited by 5,601
  5. 2017Deep reinforcement learning from human preferencescited by 3,846
  6. 2023A Survey of Confidence Estimation and Calibration in Large Language Modelscited by 253
  7. 2025TTRL: Test-Time Reinforcement Learningcited by 253
  8. 2025Evolving Language Models without Labels: Majority Drives Selection, Novelty Promotes Variationcited by 44
  9. 2025Continuous Self-Improvement of Large Language Models by Test-time Training with Verifier-Driven Sample Selectioncited by 13

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

2 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026TTCS: Test-Time Curriculum Synthesis for Self-Evolving
  2. 2025Beyond Templates: Dynamic Adaptation of Reasoning Demonstrations via Feasibility-Aware Exploration
  3. 2026TTSR: Test-Time Self-Evolving via Reflection
  4. 2026Beyond Confidence: Stability-Aware Test-Time Adaptation for LLM Reasoning
  5. 2026ThinkTwice: Jointly Optimizing Large Language Models for Reasoning and Self-Refinement
  6. 2025Learning Adaptive Parallel Reasoning with Language Models
  7. 2025From Efficiency to Adaptivity: A Deeper Look at Adaptive Reasoning in Large Language Models
  8. 2025Step-level Verifier-guided Hybrid Test-Time Scaling for Large Language Models