Uncertainty-Aware Test-Time Adaptation for Cross-Region Spatio-Temporal Fusion of Land Surface Temperature
Organizations: INSA CVL, Université d’Orléans, PRISME UR 4229, Bourges, 18022, Centre Val de Loire, France · Université d’Orléans, INSA CVL, PRISME UR 4229, Orléans, 45067, Centre Val de Loire, France · Université d’Orléans, CEDETE, UR 1210, Orléans, 45067, Centre Val de Loire, France
Abstract
Deep learning models have shown great promise in diverse remote sensing applications. However, they often struggle to generalize across geographic regions unseen during training due to domain shifts. Domain shifts occur when data distributions differ between the training region and new target regions, due to variations in land cover, climate, and environmental conditions. Test-time adaptation (TTA) has emerged as a solution to such shifts, but existing methods are primarily designed for classification and are not directly applicable to regression tasks. In this work, we address the regression task of spatio-temporal fusion (STF) for land surface temperature estimation. We propose an uncertainty-aware TTA framework that updates only the fusion module of a pre-trained STF model, guided by epistemic uncertainty, land use and land cover consistency, and bias correction, without requiring source data or labeled target samples. Experiments on four target regions with diverse climates, namely Rome in Italy, Cairo in Egypt, Madrid in Spain, and Montpellier in France, show consistent improvements in RMSE and MAE for a pre-trained model in Orléans, France. The average gains are 24.2% and 27.9%, respectively, even with limited unlabeled target data and only 10 TTA epochs.
Figures & tables
| Region | Target Dates |
|---|---|
| Rome | 01 Mar 2021, 25 Jan 2022, 04 Apr 2024, 10 Jun 2025 |
| Cairo | 13 Mar 2025, 26 Jul 2025, 20 Aug 2025 |
| Madrid | 18 Jul 2025, 03 Aug 2025 |
| Montpellier | 01 Apr 2025, 22 Jul 2025 |
| Region | Metric | Before TTA | After TTA |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rome | RMSE ( ) | 3.081 | 2.088 (32.23%) |
| MAE ( ) | 2.735 | 1.675 (38.76%) | |
| Cairo | RMSE ( ) | 3.463 | 2.778 (19.78%) |
| MAE ( ) | 2.926 | 2.344 (19.89%) | |
| Madrid | RMSE ( ) | 2.774 | 2.017 (27.29%) |
| MAE ( ) | 2.578 | 1.758 (31.81%) |
Test-Time Adaptation
Test-time adaptation updates or recalibrates pretrained models at inference to handle distribution shifts, often without target labels.
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