Universal Test-time Adaptation through Weight Ensembling, Diversity Weighting, and Prior Correction

TL;DR

This paper introduces ROID, a comprehensive method for universal test-time adaptation that employs weight ensembling, diversity weighting, and prior correction to handle various distribution shifts and maintain model performance.

Contribution

It is the first work to address universal TTA across diverse environmental conditions using a broad spectrum of settings and novel weighting and correction techniques.

Findings

Sets new standards in universal TTA performance.

Effectively handles multiple domain shifts and class prior shifts.

Improves robustness and generalization in test-time adaptation.

Abstract

Since distribution shifts are likely to occur during test-time and can drastically decrease the model's performance, online test-time adaptation (TTA) continues to update the model after deployment, leveraging the current test data. Clearly, a method proposed for online TTA has to perform well for all kinds of environmental conditions. By introducing the variable factors domain non-stationarity and temporal correlation, we first unfold all practically relevant settings and define the entity as universal TTA. We want to highlight that this is the first work that covers such a broad spectrum, which is indispensable for the use in practice. To tackle the problem of universal TTA, we identify and highlight several challenges a self-training based method has to deal with: 1) model bias and the occurrence of trivial solutions when performing entropy minimization on varying sequence lengths with and without multiple domain shifts, 2) loss of generalization which exacerbates the adaptation to multiple domain shifts and the occurrence of catastrophic forgetting, and 3) performance degradation due to shifts in class prior. To prevent the model from becoming biased, we leverage a dataset and model-agnostic certainty and diversity weighting. In order to maintain generalization and prevent catastrophic forgetting, we propose to continually weight-average the source and adapted model. To compensate for disparities in the class prior during test-time, we propose an adaptive prior correction scheme that reweights the model's predictions. We evaluate our approach, named ROID, on a wide range of settings, datasets, and models, setting new standards in the field of universal TTA. Code is available at: https://github.com/mariodoebler/test-time-adaptation