Learning on the Job: Test-Time Curricula for Targeted Reinforcement
  Learning
Authors: name: Jonas Hübotter; name: Leander Diaz-Bone; name: Ido Hakimi; name: Andreas Krause; name: Moritz Hardt
Published: 2025-10-06 13:07:14

Abstract: Humans are good at learning on the job: We learn how to solve the tasks we
face as we go along. Can a model do the same? We propose an agent that
assembles a task-specific curriculum, called test-time curriculum (TTC-RL), and
applies reinforcement learning to continue training the model for its target
task. The test-time curriculum avoids time-consuming human curation of datasets
by automatically selecting the most task-relevant data from a large pool of
available training data. Our experiments demonstrate that reinforcement
learning on a test-time curriculum consistently improves the model on its
target tasks, across a variety of evaluations and models. Notably, on
challenging math and coding benchmarks, TTC-RL improves the pass@1 of Qwen3-8B
by approximately 1.8x on AIME25 and 2.1x on CodeElo. Moreover, we find that
TTC-RL significantly raises the performance ceiling compared to the initial
model, increasing pass@8 on AIME25 from 40% to 62% and on CodeElo from 28% to
43%. Our findings show the potential of test-time curricula in extending the
test-time scaling paradigm to continual training on thousands of task-relevant
experiences during test-time.