arXiv:2603.21135cs.CVcs.AI2026-03

多聚类记忆让模型在测试时适应更稳定,尤其适合复杂分布场景。

One Pool Is Not Enough: Multi-Cluster Memory for Practical Test-Time Adaptation

  • 用像素级统计特征将测试数据分到多个聚类,更好捕捉分布多样性。
  • 在ImageNet-C上提升5.00%,DomainNet上提升12.13%,复杂任务收益更大。
  • 适合处理非独立同分布的连续测试流,提升模型鲁棒性。

测试时自适应(TTA)通过仅使用无标签测试数据,在推理阶段调整预训练模型以应对分布偏移。在实际测试时自适应(PTTA)设定下,测试流具有时间相关性且非独立同分布,记忆模块成为稳定适应的关键。然而现有方法普遍采用单一无结构样本池,我们发现这种单聚类设计与PTTA本质不匹配:流数据聚类分析显示其本质为多模态,最优混合成分数远超一个。为此,提出多聚类记忆(MCM),一种即插即用框架,利用轻量像素级统计描述符将存储样本组织为多个聚类。MCM引入三个互补机制:基于描述符的聚类分配以捕捉不同分布模式,邻近聚类合并(ACC)通过合并最相似的相邻聚类控制内存占用,统一聚类检索(UCR)确保适配过程中各模式获得均衡监督。在CIFAR-10-C、CIFAR-100-C、ImageNet-C和DomainNet上集成三种主流TTA方法,MCM在全部12种配置中实现一致改进,最高达ImageNet-C上5.00%、DomainNet上12.13%。值得注意的是,这些增益随分布复杂度上升而扩大:标签空间越大、多模性越强的任务受益越明显。基于GMM的记忆诊断进一步验证,MCM保持近似最优的分布平衡、熵和模式覆盖,而单聚类记忆则存在持续不平衡和模式丢失问题。结果确立了记忆组织作为实际测试时自适应的核心设计维度。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Test-time adaptation (TTA) adapts pre-trained models to distribution shifts at inference using only unlabeled test data. Under the Practical TTA (PTTA) setting, where test streams are temporally correlated and non-i.i.d., memory has become an indispensable component for stable adaptation, yet existing methods universally store amples in a single unstructured pool. We show that this single-cluster design is fundamentally mismatched to PTTA: a stream clusterability analysis reveals that test streams are inherently multi-modal, with the optimal number of mixture components consistently far exceeding one. To close this structural gap, we propose Multi-Cluster Memory (MCM), a plug-and-play framework that organizes stored samples into multiple clusters using lightweight pixel-level statistical descriptors. MCM introduces three complementary mechanisms: descriptor-based cluster assignment to capture distinct distributional modes, Adjacent Cluster Consolidation (ACC) to bound memory usage by merging the most similar temporally adjacent clusters, and Uniform Cluster Retrieval (UCR) to ensure balanced supervision across all modes during adaptation. Integrated with three contemporary TTA methods on CIFAR-10-C, CIFAR-100-C, ImageNet-C, and DomainNet, MCM achieves consistent improvements across all 12 configurations, with gains up to 5.00% on ImageNet-C and 12.13% on DomainNet. Notably, these gains scale with distributional complexity: larger label spaces with greater multi-modality benefit most from multi-cluster organization. GMM-based memory diagnostics further confirm that MCM maintains near-optimal distributional balance, entropy, and mode coverage, whereas single-cluster memory exhibits persistent imbalance and progressive mode loss. These results establish memory organization as a key design axis for practical test-time adaptation.

测试时自适应多聚类记忆分布偏移鲁棒性

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