TTRSD: Test-Time Reinforcement Learning with Self-Distillation for Vision-Language Models

Abstract

Test-time reinforcement learning enables vision-language models (VLMs) to adapt using unlabeled inputs. However, repeated sampling under fixed visual conditions can reinforce shared perceptual errors, while sequence-level rewards fail to isolate visual perception the foundational bottleneck that anchors multimodal reasoning risking the degradation of pre-trained reasoning capabilities. We propose TTRSD, a test-time reinforcement learning framework combining multi-view answer-level self-distillation with visual contrastive token selection. A shared policy aggregates teacher predictions across original, cropped, and downsampled views into an answer distribution. Student trajectories generated from the original image receive rewards based on the support for their final answers in this distribution. To allocate this feedback precisely toward perceptual bottlenecks, we compare the log-probabilities of the same sampled tokens under original and visually ablated inputs while holding their textual prefixes fixed, selecting visually sensitive positions for policy-gradient updates. TTRSD separates update direction, determined by group-relative advantages, from update position, determined by visual sensitivity, without requiring ground-truth labels, external verifiers, or a separate teacher. With only 20 unlabeled adaptation samples, TTRSD improves performance across seven benchmarks and three VLMs, raising InternVL3-2B's MMMU accuracy from 35.79% to 49.32%(+13.53%), demonstrating cross-dataset generalization while preserving inherent reasoning integrity.