ACL2025
Learning to Reason from Feedback at Test-Time
Yanyang Li, Michael R. Lyu, Liwei Wang
Abstract
Solving complex tasks in a single attempt is challenging for large language models (LLMs). Iterative interaction with the environment and feedback is often required to achieve success, making effective feedback utilization a critical topic. Existing approaches either struggle with length generalization or rely on naive retries without leveraging prior information. In this paper, we introduce FTTT, a novel paradigm that formulates feedback utilization as an optimization problem at test time. Additionally, we propose a learnable test-time optimizer, OPTUNE, to effectively exploit feedback. Experiments on two LLMs across four reasoning datasets demonstrate that FTTT and OPTUNE achieve superior scalability and performance 1 .