Invited Talk by Furong Huang: Rethinking Test-Time Thinking: From Token-Level Rewards to Robust Generative Agents

We present a unified perspective on test-time thinking as a lens for improving generative AI agents through finer-grained reward modeling, data-centric reasoning, and robust alignment. Beginning with GenARM, we introduce an inductive bias for denser, token-level reward modeling that guides generation during decoding, enabling token-level alignment without retraining. While GenARM targets reward design, ThinkLite-VL focuses on the data side of reasoning. It proposes a self-improvement framework that selects the most informative samples via MCTS-guided search, yielding stronger visual reasoning with fewer labels. Taking this a step further, MORSE-500 moves beyond selection to creation: it programmatically generates targeted, controllable multimodal data to systematically probe and stress-test models’ reasoning abilities. We then interrogate a central assumption in inference-time alignment: Does Thinking More Always Help? Our findings reveal that increased reasoning steps can degrade performance--not due to better or worse reasoning per se, but due to rising variance in outputs, challenging the naive scaling paradigm. Finally, AegisLLM applies test-time thinking in the service of security, using an agentic, multi-perspective framework to defend against jailbreaks, prompt injections, and unlearning attacks--all at inference time. Together, these works chart a path toward generative agents that are not only more capable, but more data-efficient, introspective, and robust in real-world deployment.