ECHO: Entropy-Confidence Hybrid Optimization for Test-Time Reinforcement Learning 文章

ArXiv CS.AI2026-05-28NEWSen作者: Chu Zhao, Enneng Yang, Yuting Liu, Jianzhe Zhao, Guibing Guo

摘要

arXiv:2602.02150v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Test-time reinforcement learning generates multiple candidate answers via repeated rollouts and performs online updates using pseudo-labels constructed by majority voting. To reduce overhead and improve exploration, prior work introduces tree structured rollouts, which share reasoning prefixes and branch at key nodes to improve sampling efficiency. However, this paradigm still faces two challenges: (1) high entropy branching can trigger rollout collapse, where the branching budget concentrates on a few trajectories with consecutive high-entropy segments, rapidly reducing the number of effective branches; (2) early pseudo-labels are noisy and biased, which can induce self-reinforcing overfitting, causing the policy to sharpen prematurely and suppress exploration. To address these issues, we propose Entropy Confidence Hybrid Group Relative Policy Optimization (ECHO).