DiSCTT: Consensus-Guided Self-Curriculum for Efficient Test-Time Adaptation in Reasoning
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
- 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,712
- 2022Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 12,302
- 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 8,851
- 2022Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Modelscited by 5,601
- 2017Deep reinforcement learning from human preferencescited by 3,846
- 2023A Survey of Confidence Estimation and Calibration in Large Language Modelscited by 253
- 2025TTRL: Test-Time Reinforcement Learningcited by 253
- 2025Evolving Language Models without Labels: Majority Drives Selection, Novelty Promotes Variationcited by 44
- 2025Continuous Self-Improvement of Large Language Models by Test-time Training with Verifier-Driven Sample Selectioncited by 13
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.
2 papers.
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026TTCS: Test-Time Curriculum Synthesis for Self-Evolving
- 2025Beyond Templates: Dynamic Adaptation of Reasoning Demonstrations via Feasibility-Aware Exploration
- 2026TTSR: Test-Time Self-Evolving via Reflection
- 2026Beyond Confidence: Stability-Aware Test-Time Adaptation for LLM Reasoning
- 2026ThinkTwice: Jointly Optimizing Large Language Models for Reasoning and Self-Refinement
- 2025Learning Adaptive Parallel Reasoning with Language Models
- 2025From Efficiency to Adaptivity: A Deeper Look at Adaptive Reasoning in Large Language Models
- 2025Step-level Verifier-guided Hybrid Test-Time Scaling for Large Language Models