SPINE: Token-Selective Test-Time Reinforcement Learning with Entropy-Band Regularization

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) and multimodal LLMs (MLL-Ms) excel at chain-of-thought reasoning but face distribution shift at test-time and a lack of verifiable supervision. Recent test-time reinforcement learning (TTRL) methods derive label-free pseudo-rewards from self-consistency voting over sampled trajectories, yet they often collapse: the majority-vote reward prevails, responses shorten, and Pass@1 declines. We trace this to uniform sequence updates in which most tokens are low-entropy followers, while a small high-entropy subset determines the reasoning branches. Thus we propose \method, a token-selective test-time reinforcement learning framework that (i) performs distribution-aware forking-token selection to update only decision-critical branch points, and (ii) applies a robust entropy-band regularizer at those tokens to prevent premature collapse and suppress noisy drift. \method plugs into GRPO-style objectives (optionally with a KL anchor) and requires neither labels nor reward models. Across eight benchmarks spanning multimodal VQA, text-only reasoning, \method consistently improves Pass@1 over TTRL while avoiding response-length collapse and yielding more stable training dynamics on both LLM and MLLM backbones. These results indicate that aligning updates with chain-of-thought branch points is a simple and label-free mechanism for stable and effective test-time adaptation in reasoning models. Code will be released.