A Survey on Self-Improving Test-Time Intelligence: Feedback-Driven Adapting, Learning, and Scaling at Inference

Abstract: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.

Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2609.01679 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2609.01679v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.01679 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11633-026-1694-1 Focus to learn more DOI(s) linking to related resources

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