Deep neural nets achieve remarkable performance when training and test data share the same distribution, but this assumption frequently breaks in real-world deployment, where data undergoes continual distributional shifts. Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA) addresses this challenge by adapting pretrained models to non-stationary target distributions on-the-fly, without access to source data or labeled targets, while mitigating two critical failure modes: catastrophic forgetting of source knowledge and error accumulation from noisy pseudo-labels over extended time horizons.
The paper surveys Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA), a framework that adapts pretrained computer‑vision models to non‑stationary target distributions without source data or labeled targets, while avoiding catastrophic forgetting and error accumulation. It formally defines the CTTA problem, categorizes existing methods into optimization‑based, parameter‑efficient, and architecture‑based families, and reviews representative techniques and benchmarks across standard evaluation settings. The survey also outlines current limitations and proposes future research directions, such as adapting foundation models and black‑box systems.
By Sarthak Kumar Maharana, Shambhavi Mishra, Yunbei Zhang, Shuaicheng Niu, Taki Hasan Rafi, Jihun Hamm, Marco Pedersoli, Jose Dolz, Yunhui Guo
arXiv:2609.36655v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Continual test-time adaptation (CTTA) adapts a source model to an unlabeled test stream whose distribution may change over time. Existing TTA methods o...
By Youjia Zhang, Huiling Liu, Soyun Choi, Jaehong Yoon, Sungeun Hong
arXiv:2606. 31420v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) enables models trained on a source domain to adapt online to unlabeled test data under distribution shifts.
By Shaoyang Huang, Yashi Zhu, Yichen Yu, Lei Zhang, Zhang Yi, Tao He
arXiv:2609.24111v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Test-time adaptation (TTA) addresses distribution shift using only unlabeled test data. Existing methods typically adapt pretrained models by updating...
By Muhammad Sudipto Siam Dip, Ali Etemad
The paper introduces UnInfo, a test‑time adaptation method for vision‑language models like CLIP that addresses image corruption—a realistic distribution shift caused by sensor conditions. UnInfo leverages uniformity‑aware confidence maximization, information‑aware loss balancing, and knowledge distillation from an EMA teacher to preserve embedding uniformity and improve zero‑shot classification accuracy. Experiments show that UnInfo outperforms existing TTA methods on corrupted image datasets.
By Kazuki Adachi, Shin'ya Yamaguchi, Tomoki Hamagami
arXiv:2608. 19890v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) methods aim to bridge the domain gap between the source and target domains.
By Jia-Qi Lin, Yuangang Pan, Chang-Dong Wang, Haizhang Zhang, Ivor W. Tsang, Joey Tianyi Zhou
arXiv:2603.14254v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Test-time adaptation (TTA) aims to improve model robustness under distribution shifts by adapting to unlabeled test data, but most existing methods...
By Ronghao Zhang, Shuaicheng Niu, Qi Deng, Yanjie Dong, Jian Chen, Runhao Zeng
arXiv:2606. 07646v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Test-time adaptation (TTA) aims to align a model to shifting test domains using only unlabeled streaming data.
By Xiaoran Xu, Yifan Xu, Yupeng Wu, Xiaoshan Yang, Changsheng Xu
arXiv:2608.29395v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Vision-language models such as CLIP and SigLIP provide strong zero-shot recognition, but their predictions can degrade when deployed on target data tha...
By Pedram MohajerAnsari, Amir Salarpour, Run Wang, Mert D. Pes\'e
arXiv:2608.29920v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Test-time adaptation (TTA) promises robustness under distribution shift by updating a pretrained model on unlabeled test data, but strict online TTA...
By Chandler Timm C. Doloriel, Yunbei Zhang, Muhammad Salman Siddiqui, Tor Kristian Stevik, Fadi Al Machot, Kristian Hovde Liland, Habib Ullah
arXiv:2602.00114v5 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Data augmentation is crucial for model generalization, but existing methods are mostly centered on the training stage. Test-time augmentation...
By Yunwei Bai, Yao Shu, Ying Kiat Tan, Tsuhan Chen