Paper Detail
Zixuan Wang, Xingyu Dang, Rui-Jie Zhu, Zixin Wen, Hengyu Fu, Wenhao Chai, Jason D. Lee
Effective long-context modeling is not merely about retaining more of the past, but about preserving the information that may prove relevant later. Test-time training (TTT) is an appealing approach that performs online parameter updates for long-context modeling, yet existing TTT methods only optimize either reconstruction or online adaptation objectives without considering the future utility of retained information. In this work, we propose \textbf{T}est-\textbf{T}ime \textbf{C}ontext \textbf{D}istillation (TTCD), a TTT framework that introduces a self-supervised objective for allocating limited memory capacity for future use. Specifically, TTCD uses a long-window teacher to supervise the fast weights of a short-window student, where the hidden-state discrepancy between them offers a dense, self-supervised signal guiding the model to memorize the contextual information crucial for future token predictions. We focus on an in-place variant: In-Place TTCD (IP-TTCD), which uses the existing MLP parameters as the fast weights. Experiments on long-context language modeling tasks show IP-TTCD consistently outperforms DeltaNet, Gated DeltaNet, sliding-window attention, and TTT when pre-trained from scratch. Furthermore, IP-TTCD allows pre-trained transformer models to adapt their parameters during inference through continual pre-training, gaining long-context capabilities with only a lightweight architectural augmentation. Our results position TTCD as a step toward architectural continual learning.
No structured notes yet. Add `summary_sections`, `why_relevant`, `claim_impact`, or `next_action` in `papers.jsonl` to enrich this view.
No ranking explanation is available yet.
No tags.
@article{wang2026learning,
title = {Learning What to Remember: Test-Time Training via Context Distillation},
author = {Zixuan Wang and Xingyu Dang and Rui-Jie Zhu and Zixin Wen and Hengyu Fu and Wenhao Chai and Jason D. Lee},
year = {2026},
abstract = {Effective long-context modeling is not merely about retaining more of the past, but about preserving the information that may prove relevant later. Test-time training (TTT) is an appealing approach that performs online parameter updates for long-context modeling, yet existing TTT methods only optimize either reconstruction or online adaptation objectives without considering the future utility of retained information. In this work, we propose \textbackslash{}textbf\{T\}est-\textbackslash{}textbf\{T\}ime \textbackslash{}textbf\{C\}ontext \textbackslash{}textbf\{D},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01672},
keywords = {cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG},
eprint = {2608.01672},
archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}
{}