arXiv Computer Vision

Tail Cues, Principal Corrections: Plug-and-Play Rectification for Open-Set Test-Time Adaptation

Tail Cues, Principal Corrections: Plug-and-Play Rectification for Open-Set Test-Time Adaptation introduces TALOR, a lightweight module that rectifies features for non-stationary target streams by decomposing them into high-gain principal and low-gain tail coordinates. TALOR applies a soft-routed affine correction in the principal subspace, subtracts drift via weighted ridge regression, and reconstructs the feature for the source head. On ImageNet-C with six csOOD datasets, TALOR surpasses the next-best UniEnt by 2.2% H-score, runs 2.5× faster, and uses only 12% of its GPU memory, while also boosting COME to 68.4% H-score with minimal memory overhead.

arXiv AI
Sep 16

Sparse MLLM Anchors, Dense Adaptation: Breaking the Self-Referential Loop in Wild Test-Time Adaptation

The paper introduces MASA, a method for Wild Test-Time Adaptation that uses a frozen multimodal large language model to provide structured semantic anchors, thereby avoiding the self-referential loop common in existing WTTA techniques. MASA selects a small, diverse set of reliability-ranked anchors, encodes their descriptions, propagates them to nearby test samples, and stores this visual‑semantic information in an online prototype memory. The stored descriptors enable lightweight adaptation of normalization parameters, and MASA is evaluated on the WTTA ImageNet‑C benchmark with ResNet and ViT backbones under limited‑batch, mixed‑domain, and imbalanced‑label‑shift scenarios.

By Zhenbin Wang, Lei Zhang, Lituan Wang, Yan Wang, Zhao Zhang, Wei Huang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 15

What Drives Test-Time Adaptation for CLIP? A Controlled Empirical Study from an Update Perspective

arXiv:2606. 14299v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP have become a standard backbone for open-vocabulary recognition, yet their zero-shot predictions remain vulnerable to distribution shifts encountered at deployment.

By Jiazhen Huang, Xiao Chen, Zhiming Liu, Yaru Sun, Jingyan Jiang, Zhi Wang
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 3

DESA-TTA: Dynamic EMA and Source Anchoring for Test-Time Adaptation

DESA‑TTA introduces a low‑overhead test‑time adaptation technique for vision‑language object detectors that dynamically adjusts the teacher’s exponential moving average coefficient based on pseudo‑label confidence and box density. It also employs source anchoring to gradually pull student parameters back toward their pretrained values, mitigating cumulative drift. Experiments on multiple distribution shifts and two VLOD architectures demonstrate consistent gains, with a 14.5‑point AP₅₀ improvement on VOC‑C and a 55% higher inference throughput compared to the prior state‑of‑the‑art TTA method for YOLO‑World.

By Atif Belal, Lilian Hollard, Marco Pedersoli, Eric Granger
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Adapting Without Gradients: Affine Statistics Transport and What Its Certificate Can Tell You

The paper introduces CASTER, a gradient‑free test‑time adaptation method that keeps the model frozen by storing source class statistics in a discriminative subspace and applying an affine transformation estimated from target‑batch moments. CASTER avoids backward passes, optimizer state, and large feature banks, outperforming k‑NN on frozen features in most backbone‑dataset settings while using far less memory. The authors also propose a residual‑to‑margin transportability certificate that flags when affine transport is unreliable, and demonstrate that gating based on this certificate can recover performance losses.

By Salim Khazem, Ibrahim Mohamed Serouis
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

LongVU-TTT: Causal Test-Time Training for Visual Resampling in Long Video Understanding

LongVU‑TTT is a causal test‑time training method for long‑video multimodal large language models that inserts a convolutional resampler with fast‑weight updates between the vision encoder and the LLM. The fast weights adapt per video and contextualize frame features before compression, while a hybrid selector keeps explicit visual evidence for downstream reasoning. Experiments show that TTT‑Conv outperforms TTT‑MLP and bidirectional Mamba2 on MLVU, and beats attention‑ and fixed‑state recurrent resamplers on three benchmarks, achieving competitive results on five video‑understanding tasks after reducing 512 frames to 128 LLM frames.

By Mahmoud Ahmed, Sameh Abdulah, Olatunji Ruwase, Sam Ade Jacobs, Mathis Bode, Mohamed Elhoseiny