不依赖反向传播的测试时自适应,提升模型在分布偏移下的鲁棒性。
Backpropagation-Free Test-Time Adaptation via Probabilistic Gaussian Alignment
- 将测试时自适应建模为高斯概率推断,用类条件均值和共享协方差矩阵表示特征分布。
- 在多个数据集上实现领先性能,且无需梯度更新或源数据支持。
- 适合实时部署场景,尤其适用于无源数据、无标签目标数据的边缘计算应用。
测试时自适应(TTA)通过利用推理阶段的无标签测试数据,提升模型在分布偏移下的零样本鲁棒性。尽管已有显著进展,但仍面临两大挑战:一是多数方法依赖反向传播或迭代优化,限制了可扩展性并阻碍实时部署;二是缺乏对类别条件特征分布的显式建模,而该建模对生成可靠决策边界和校准预测至关重要,但因测试时无源数据与监督信号,长期被忽视。本文提出ADAPT——一种先进的分布感知且无需反向传播的测试时自适应方法。我们将TTA重构为高斯概率推断任务,通过逐步更新的类均值与共享协方差矩阵建模类别条件似然,实现闭式、免训练推理。为纠正潜在似然偏差,引入基于CLIP先验的轻量级正则化及历史知识库。ADAPT无需源数据、无需梯度更新,也不需完整访问目标数据,支持在线与归纳设置。大量实验表明,该方法在多种基准上于广泛分布偏移下均达到最先进性能,兼具卓越可扩展性与鲁棒性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Test-time adaptation (TTA) enhances the zero-shot robustness under distribution shifts by leveraging unlabeled test data during inference. Despite notable advances, several challenges still limit its broader applicability. First, most methods rely on backpropagation or iterative optimization, which limits scalability and hinders real-time deployment. Second, they lack explicit modeling of class-conditional feature distributions. This modeling is crucial for producing reliable decision boundaries and calibrated predictions, but it remains underexplored due to the lack of both source data and supervision at test time. In this paper, we propose ADAPT, an Advanced Distribution-Aware and backPropagation-free Test-time adaptation method. We reframe TTA as a Gaussian probabilistic inference task by modeling class-conditional likelihoods using gradually updated class means and a shared covariance matrix. This enables closed-form, training-free inference. To correct potential likelihood bias, we introduce lightweight regularization guided by CLIP priors and a historical knowledge bank. ADAPT requires no source data, no gradient updates, and no full access to target data, supporting both online and transductive settings. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance under a wide range of distribution shifts with superior scalability and robustness.
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