Long contexts break transformers: attention scores dilute across thousands of tokens, critical information gets lost in the middle, and the model cannot adapt to novel patterns at inference time. Recent work on test-time adaptation addresses this by maintaining a form of working memory—transient parameters updated on the current context—but existing approaches employ uniform write policies that waste computation on low-value regions and suffer from high gradient variance across semantically heterogeneous contexts. In this work, we reframe test-time adaptation as a budget-constrained memory consolidation problem, asking: given limited computational budget, which parts of the context should be consolidated into working memory? We propose GDWM (Gated Differentiable Working Memory), a framework that introduces a Write Controller to gate the memory consolidation process. Our controller estimates Contextual Utility—an information-theoretic measure quantifying how much each region depends on long-range context—and allocates gradient steps accordingly, subject to a coverage constraint that ensures global representation. Theoretically, we prove that our chunk-restricted sampling strategy reduces gradient variance by eliminating inter-chunk variance via the Law of Total Variance. Experiments on ZeroSCROLLS and LongBench v2 benchmarks demonstrate that GDWM achieves comparable or superior performance with 4 ×fewer gradient steps compared to uniform baselines—excelling on sparse-information tasks (+6–13% on Qasper, +5–13% on GovReport for smaller models) while revealing principled trade-offs on dense-coverage tasks, establishing a new efficiency-performance Pareto frontier for test-time adaptation.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made remarkable breakthroughs in reasoning, yet continue to struggle with hallucinations, logical errors, and inability to self-correct during complex multi-step tasks. Current approaches like chain-of-thought prompting offer limited reasoning capabilities that fail when precise step validation is required. We propose Environment Augmented Generation (EAG), a framework that enhances LLM reasoning through: (1) real-time environmental feedback validating each reasoning step, (2) dynamic branch exploration for investigating alternative solution paths when faced with errors, and (3) experience-based learning from successful reasoning trajectories. Unlike existing methods, EAG enables deliberate backtracking and strategic replanning through tight integration of execution feedback with branching exploration. Our a1-32B model achieves state-of-the-art performance among similar-sized models across all benchmarks, matching larger models like o1 on competition mathematics while outperforming comparable models by up to 24.4 percentage points. Analysis reveals EAG’s distinctive scaling pattern: initial token investment in environment interaction yields substantial long-term performance dividends, with advantages amplifying proportionally to task complexity.

Medical dialogue generation (MDG) has gained increasing attention due to its substantial practical value. Previous works typically employ a sequence-to-sequence framework to generate medical responses by modeling dialogue context as sequential text with annotated medical entities. While these methods have been successful in generating fluent responses, they fail to provide process explanations of reasoning and require extensive entity annotation. To address these limitations, we propose the method Bootstrap Prompting for Explicit Reasoning in MDG (BP4ER), which explicitly model MDG’s multi-step reasoning process and iteratively enhance this reasoning process. We employ a least-to-most prompting strategy to guide a large language model (LLM) in explicit reasoning, breaking down MDG into simpler sub-questions. These sub-questions build on answers from previous ones. Additionally, we also introduce two distinct bootstrapping techniques for prompting, which autonomously correct errors and facilitate the LLM’s explicit reasoning. This approach eliminates the need for entity annotation and increases the transparency of the MDG process by explicitly generating the intermediate reasoning chain. Experimental results on the two publicly datasets show that BP4ER outperforms state-of-the-art methods across both objective and subjective evaluation.

Previous Sign Language Translation (SLT) methods achieve superior performance by relying on gloss annotations. However, labeling high-quality glosses is a labor-intensive task, which limits the further development of SLT. Although some approaches work towards gloss-free SLT through jointly training the visual encoder and translation network, these efforts still suffer from poor performance and inefficient use of the powerful Large Language Model (LLM). Most seriously, we find that directly introducing LLM into SLT will lead to insufficient learning of visual representations as LLM dominates the learning curve. To address these problems, we propose Factorized Learning assisted with Large Language Model (FLa-LLM) for gloss-free SLT. Concretely, we factorize the training process into two stages. In the visual initialing stage, we employ a lightweight translation model after the visual encoder to pre-train the visual encoder. In the LLM fine-tuning stage, we freeze the acquired knowledge in the visual encoder and integrate it with a pre-trained LLM to inspire the LLM’s translation potential. This factorized training strategy proves to be highly effective as evidenced by significant improvements achieved across three SLT datasets which are all conducted under the gloss-free setting.