提出统一框架,梳理推理时自我改进的三种路径。
A Survey on Self-Improving Test-Time Intelligence: Feedback-Driven Adapting, Learning, and Scaling at Inference

- 以反馈驱动视角整合推理时自适应、学习与扩展方法
- 揭示三类技术在混合系统中日益重叠的趋势
- 适合关注AI部署阶段动态优化的研究者
AI系统在部署过程中持续改进能力愈发重要。当推理不再局限于固定模型的静态执行,越来越多研究探索如何利用测试时信息和额外计算资源,使模型在运行中实时优化行为。当前进展主要沿两个方向:一是通过测试时信号调整模型状态,二是借助更多采样或工具调用等推理时资源提升预测性能。然而,这两个方向常在不同社区独立发展,术语差异导致关联性不清晰。本文提出反馈驱动的测试时智能(Test-Time Intelligence, TTI)作为统一视角,连接测试时自适应、测试时学习与测试时扩展,揭示其异同及在混合系统中的融合趋势。该框架有助于整合分散的研究思路,为推理时自改进提供清晰概念基础。我们综述了视觉、语言、多模态学习、生成模型、机器人学与医疗等领域的代表性方法、应用与开放挑战,旨在构建自改进AI系统的统一研究范式与路线图。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The ability of AI systems to improve their behavior during deployment is becoming increasingly important. As inference moves beyond the static execution of a fixed trained model, a growing body of work studies how models can refine their behavior on the fly by exploiting test-time information and additional computation. These developments have largely evolved along two directions: methods that modify the model's state using test-time signals, and methods that improve predictions through extra inference-time resources such as more sampling and tool use. However, these directions are often studied in separate communities with different terminology, making their connections harder to see. In this survey, we present feedback-driven Test-Time Intelligence (TTI) as a unified perspective for understanding such deployment-time improvement. We use this view to relate test-time adaptation, test-time learning, and test-time scaling, highlighting both their distinctions and their growing overlap in hybrid systems. This unified framework helps connect previously fragmented ideas and provides a clearer conceptual foundation for studying inference-time self-improvement. We review major methodological paradigms, representative applications, and open challenges across vision, language, multimodal learning, generative models, robotics, and healthcare. Our goal is to provide a coherent foundation and research roadmap for the study of self-improving AI systems at test time.
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