Test-time adaptation (TTA) refers to adapting neural networks to distribution shifts, specifically with just access to unlabeled test samples from the new domain at test-time. Prior TTA methods optimize over unsupervised objectives such as the entropy of model predictions in TENT (Wang et al., 2021), but it is unclear what exactly makes a good TTA loss. In this paper, we start by presenting a surprising phenomenon: if we attempt to $\textit{meta-learn}$ the ``best'' possible TTA loss over a wide class of functions, then we recover a function that is $\textit{remarkably}$ similar to (a temperature-scaled version of) the softmax-entropy employed by TENT. This only holds, however, if the classifier we are adapting is trained via cross-entropy loss; if the classifier is trained via squared loss, a different ``best'' TTA loss emerges.To explain this phenomenon, we analyze test-time adaptation through the lens of the training losses's $\textit{convex conjugate}$. We show that under natural conditions, this (unsupervised) conjugate function can be viewed as a good local approximation to the original supervised loss and indeed, it recovers the ``best'' losses found by meta-learning.

We begin with the following lemma that demonstrates the optimal policy for a fixed task distribution.

The performance of deep learning models depends heavily on test samples at runtime, and shifts from the training data distribution can significantly reduce accuracy. Test-time adaptation (TTA) addresses this by adapting models during inference without requiring labeled test data or access to the original training set. While research has explored TTA from various perspectives like algorithmic complexity, data and class distribution shifts, model architectures, and offline versus continuous learning, constraints specific to mobile and edge devices remain underexplored. We propose BoTTA, a benchmark designed to evaluate TTA methods under practical constraints on mobile and edge devices. Our evaluation targets four key challenges caused by limited resources and usage conditions: (i) limited test samples, (ii) limited exposure to categories, (iii) diverse distribution shifts, and (iv) overlapping shifts within a sample. We assess state-of-the-art TTA methods under these scenarios using benchmark datasets and report system-level metrics on a real testbed. Furthermore, unlike prior work, we align with on-device requirements by advocating periodic adaptation instead of continuous inference-time adaptation. Experiments reveal key insights: many recent TTA algorithms struggle with small datasets, fail to generalize to unseen categories, and depend on the diversity and complexity of distribution shifts. BoTTA also reports device-specific resource use. For example, while SHOT improves accuracy by $2.25\times$ with $512$ adaptation samples, it uses $1.08\times$ peak memory on Raspberry Pi versus the base model. BoTTA offers actionable guidance for TTA in real-world, resource-constrained deployments.

Test-time adaptation (TTA) refers to adapting neural networks to distribution shifts, specifically with just access to unlabeled test samples from the new domain at test-time. Prior TTA methods optimize over unsupervised objectives such as the entropy of model predictions in TENT (Wang et al., 2021), but it is unclear what exactly makes a good TTA loss. In this paper, we start by presenting a surprising phenomenon: if we attempt to \textit{meta-learn} the best'' possible TTA loss over a wide class of functions, then we recover a function that is \textit{remarkably} similar to (a temperature-scaled version of) the softmax-entropy employed by TENT. This only holds, however, if the classifier we are adapting is trained via cross-entropy loss; if the classifier is trained via squared loss, a different best'' TTA loss emerges.To explain this phenomenon, we analyze test-time adaptation through the lens of the training losses's \textit{convex conjugate} . We show that under natural conditions, this (unsupervised) conjugate function can be viewed as a good local approximation to the original supervised loss and indeed, it recovers the best'' losses found by meta-learning.

Test Time Adaptation (TTA) is a pivotal concept in machine learning, enabling models to perform well in real-world scenarios, where test data distribution differs from training. In this work, we propose a novel approach called pseudo Source guided Target Clustering (pSTarC) addressing the relatively unexplored area of TTA under real-world domain shifts. This method draws inspiration from target clustering techniques and exploits the source classifier for generating pseudo-source samples. The test samples are strategically aligned with these pseudo-source samples, facilitating their clustering and thereby enhancing TTA performance. pSTarC operates solely within the fully test-time adaptation protocol, removing the need for actual source data. Experimental validation on a variety of domain shift datasets, namely VisDA, Office-Home, DomainNet-126, CIFAR-100C verifies pSTarC's effectiveness. This method exhibits significant improvements in prediction accuracy along with efficient computational requirements. Furthermore, we also demonstrate the universality of the pSTarC framework by showing its effectiveness for the continuous TTA framework. The source code for our method is available at https://manogna-s.github.io/pstarc

TLDR: Current SOTA methods for scene understanding, though impressive, often fail to decompose out-of-distribution scenes. Problem Statement: In machine learning, we often assume the train and test split are IID samples from the same distribution. In fact, there is a distribution shift happening all the time! For example on the left, we visualize images from the ImageNet Chair category, and on the right, we visualize the ObjectNet chair category. As you can see there are a variety of real-world distribution shifts happening all the time.

This paper proposes a novel online evaluation protocol for Test Time Adaptation (TTA) methods, which penalizes slower methods by providing them with fewer samples for adaptation. TTA methods leverage unlabeled data at test time to adapt to distribution shifts. Though many effective methods have been proposed, their impressive performance usually comes at the cost of significantly increased computation budgets. Current evaluation protocols overlook the effect of this extra computation cost, affecting their real-world applicability. To address this issue, we propose a more realistic evaluation protocol for TTA methods, where data is received in an online fashion from a constant-speed data stream, thereby accounting for the method's adaptation speed. We apply our proposed protocol to benchmark several TTA methods on multiple datasets and scenarios. Extensive experiments shows that, when accounting for inference speed, simple and fast approaches can outperform more sophisticated but slower methods. For example, SHOT from 2020 outperforms the state-of-the-art method SAR from 2023 under our online setting. Our online evaluation protocol emphasizes the need for developing TTA methods that are efficient and applicable in realistic settings.

Recently, test time adaptation (TTA) has attracted increasing attention due to its power of handling the distribution shift issue in the real world. Unlike what has been developed for convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for image data, TTA is less explored for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). There is still a lack of efficient algorithms tailored for graphs with irregular structures. In this paper, we present a novel test time adaptation strategy named Graph Adversarial Pseudo Group Contrast (GAPGC), for graph neural networks TTA, to better adapt to the Out Of Distribution (OOD) test data. Specifically, GAPGC employs a contrastive learning variant as a self-supervised task during TTA, equipped with Adversarial Learnable Augmenter and Group Pseudo-Positive Samples to enhance the relevance between the self-supervised task and the main task, boosting the performance of the main task. Furthermore, we provide theoretical evidence that GAPGC can extract minimal sufficient information for the main task from information theory perspective. Extensive experiments on molecular scaffold OOD dataset demonstrated that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on GNNs.

Imagine that you are building the next generation machine learning model for handwriting transcription. Based on previous iterations of your product, you have identified a key challenge for this rollout: after deployment, new end users often have different and unseen handwriting styles, leading to distribution shift. One solution for this challenge is to learn an adaptive model that can specialize and adjust to each user's handwriting style over time. This solution seems promising, but it must be balanced against concerns about ease of use: requiring users to provide feedback to the model may be cumbersome and hinder adoption. Is it possible instead to learn a model that can adapt to new users without labels?