arXiv AI By Zhenbin Wang, Lei Zhang, Lituan Wang, Yan Wang, Zhao Zhang, Wei Huang

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

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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.

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