Optimizing Test-Time Compute via Meta Reinforcement Fine-Tuning
Authors: name: Yuxiao Qu; name: Matthew Y. R. Yang; name: Amrith Setlur; name: Lewis Tunstall; name: Edward Emanuel Beeching; name: Ruslan Salakhutdinov; name: Aviral Kumar
Published: 2025-03-10 17:40:43

Abstract: Training models to effectively use test-time compute is crucial for improving
the reasoning performance of LLMs. Current methods mostly do so via fine-tuning
on search traces or running RL with 0/1 outcome reward, but do these approaches
efficiently utilize test-time compute? Would these approaches continue to scale
as the budget improves? In this paper, we try to answer these questions. We
formalize the problem of optimizing test-time compute as a meta-reinforcement
learning (RL) problem, which provides a principled perspective on spending
test-time compute. This perspective enables us to view the long output stream
from the LLM as consisting of several episodes run at test time and leads us to
use a notion of cumulative regret over output tokens as a way to measure the
efficacy of test-time compute. Akin to how RL algorithms can best tradeoff
exploration and exploitation over training, minimizing cumulative regret would
also provide the best balance between exploration and exploitation in the token
stream. While we show that state-of-the-art models do not minimize regret, one
can do so by maximizing a dense reward bonus in conjunction with the outcome
0/1 reward RL. This bonus is the ''progress'' made by each subsequent block in
the output stream, quantified by the change in the likelihood of eventual
success. Using these insights, we develop Meta Reinforcement Fine-Tuning, or
MRT, a new class of fine-tuning methods for optimizing test-time compute. MRT
leads to a 2-3x relative gain in performance and roughly a 1.5x gain in token
efficiency for math reasoning compared to outcome-reward RL.