SELF-HARMONY: LEARNING TO HARMONIZE SELF-SUPERVISION AND SELF-PLAY IN TEST-TIME REINFORCEMENT LEARNING

Ru Wang, Wei Huang, Qi Cao, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo, Jiaxian Guo

Keywords: large language models, Test-time reinforcement learning, test-time adaptation, self-play, pseudo labeling, infomax

TL;DR: Through test-time self-play between a solver and a reframer, our method, Self-Harmony, uses an InfoMax-derived harmonic mean to score and select pseudo-labels based on their joint frequency across original and reframed questions.

Abstract:

Test-time reinforcement learning (TTRL) offers a label-free paradigm for adapting models using only synthetic signals at inference, but its success hinges on constructing reliable learning signals. Standard approaches such as majority voting often collapse to spurious yet popular answers.
We introduce Self-Harmony, a framework built on a simple intuition: the correct answer should remain stable across both an original question and its paraphrase. Self-Harmony operationalizes this by employing a single model in two complementary roles: a Solver to produce answers and a Reframer to rephrase the input. Based on this, we further propose a pseudo-label method: instead of majority voting, it aggregates answer frequencies across these original and reframed views using the harmonic mean. This is a process that naturally selects for solutions stable under reframing, thereby avoiding the common trap of favoring view-dependent, spurious answers.
Crucially, this requires no human supervision or auxiliary models. Across diverse reasoning benchmarks, Self-Harmony achieves state-of-the-art results at the label-free test-time setting, ranking first in 28 of 30 settings across multiple methods. Beyond accuracy, it demonstrates unprecedented robustness, with zero training failures in all experiments, underscoring its stability and reliability.

Primary Area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs

Submission Number: 23727