Test-Time Adaptation

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Overview

Test-time adaptation studies how pretrained models can adjust to changing data during deployment, improving reliability when target labels or retraining are unavailable. Common approaches use entropy minimization, pseudo-labels, normalization or feature-statistics alignment, and lightweight prompts, adapters, caches, or memory; gradient-free methods aim to reduce compute and memory costs. Work spans image corruptions and domain shifts, medical imaging, time-series forecasting, language-model reasoning, and robotics. A central tension is that noisy self-generated signals can cause error accumulation or forgetting, so methods must determine when adaptation is useful and how to evaluate its benefits beyond average accuracy.

Latest papers

CardsList

322 papers50 papers in the last four weeks, up 47% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

  1. Online Adaptation of Visual Odometry Frontends with Image-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning

    Mar 23, 2026Simone Nascivera, Leonard Bauersfeld, Jeff Delaune +1Test-Time AdaptationVisual Odometry

    Robotics and Perception Group, University of Zurich, Switzerland. · Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, USA.

  2. SOLAR: A Self-Optimizing Open-Ended Autonomous Agent for Lifelong Learning and Continual Adaptation

    Mar 23, 2026Nitin Vetcha, Dianbo LiuContinual Learning for LLM AgentsContinual Learning for LLMs

    Department of Ophthalmology, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, Singapore · Department of Computational and Data Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, Karnataka, India

  3. Dual-level Adaptation for Multi-Object Tracking: Building Test-Time Calibration from Experience and Intuition

    Mar 23, 2026Wen Guo, Pengfei Zhao, Zongmeng Wang +2Multi-Object TrackingTest-Time Adaptation

    Shandong Technology and Business University · Inner Mongolia University · University of Science and Technology Beijing +1

  4. Test-Time Adaptation via Cache Personalization for Facial Expression Recognition in Videos

    Mar 22, 2026Masoumeh Sharafi, Muhammad Osama Zeeshan, Soufiane Belharbi +3Test-Time AdaptationTest-Time Adaptation of VLMs

    LIVIA, Department of Systems Engineering, ´ETS Montreal, Canada · LIVIA, Department of Software and IT Engineering, ´ETS Montreal, Canada

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

    Mar 22, 2026Yu-Wen Tseng, Xingyi Zheng, Ya-Chen Wu +4Test-Time Adaptation

    National Taiwan University, Taiwan · Hon Hai Research Institute, Taiwan · National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan

  6. Evaluating Test-Time Adaptation For Facial Expression Recognition Under Natural Cross-Dataset Distribution Shifts

    Mar 20, 2026John Turnbull, Shivam Grover, Amin Jalali +1Test-Time AdaptationDistribution Shift Robustness

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada

  7. ATHENA: Adaptive Test-Time Steering for Improving Count Fidelity in Diffusion Models

    Mar 20, 2026Mohammad Shahab Sepehri, Asal Mehradfar, Berk Tinaz +2T2I GenerationT2I Diffusion Models

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

  8. Adaptive Decoding via Test-Time Policy Learning for Self-Improving Generation

    Mar 19, 2026Asmita Bhardwaj, Yuya Jeremy Ong, Eelaaf Zahid +1Language Model DecodingTest-Time Adaptation

    UC San Diego San Diego, CA · Plastic Labs San Jose, CA · IBM Research Cambridge, MA +1

  9. EviATTA: Evidential Active Test-Time Adaptation for Medical Segment Anything Models

    Mar 15, 2026Jiayi Chen, Yasmeen George, Winston Chong +1Test-Time AdaptationVision Foundation Model Adaptation

    Department of Data Science & AI, Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, VIC 3800, Australia · Alfred Health, VIC 3004, Australia

  10. ZOTTA: Test-Time Adaptation with Gradient-Free Zeroth-Order Optimization

    Mar 15, 2026Ronghao Zhang, Shuaicheng Niu, Qi Deng +3Test-Time AdaptationZeroth-Order Optimization

    South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, 510000, China. · Nanyang Technological University, 639798, Singapore. · Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, 710049, China. +1

  11. Learn Structure, Adapt on the Fly: Multi-Scale Residual Learning and Online Adaptation for Aerial Manipulators

    Mar 12, 2026Samaksh Ujjawal, Naveen Sudheer Nair, Shivansh Pratap Singh +3Aerial RoboticsTest-Time Adaptation

    1Robotics Research Center, IIIT Hyderabad, India. · Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, UK. · 3Newcastle University, UK.

  12. Test-time Ego-Exo-centric Adaptation for Action Anticipation via Multi-Label Prototype Growing and Dual-Clue Consistency

    Mar 10, 2026Zhaofeng Shi, Heqian Qiu, Lanxiao Wang +4Test-Time AdaptationNext-Action Prediction

    University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China

  13. MetaDAT: Generalizable Trajectory Prediction via Meta Pre-training and Data-Adaptive Test-Time Updating

    Mar 10, 2026Yuning Wang, Pu Zhang, Yuan He +2Adaptive Learning RateTrajectory Prediction

    State Key Laboratory of Human-Machine Hybrid Augmented Intelligence, IAIR, Xi’an Jiaotong University, China · KargoBot, China

  14. TA-GGAD: Testing-time Adaptive Graph Model for Generalist Graph Anomaly Detection

    Mar 10, 2026Xiong Zhang, Hong Peng, Changlong Fu +3Anomaly DetectionCross-Dataset Generalization

    School of Software and AI, Yunnan University, Kunming, China

  15. Predictive Spectral Calibration for Source-Free Test-Time Regression

    Mar 10, 2026Nguyen Viet Tuan Kiet, Huynh Thanh Trung, Pham Huy HieuTest-Time AdaptationSource-Free Domain Adaptation

    Hanoi University of Science and Technology · VinUniversity

  16. TALON: Test-time Adaptive Learning for On-the-Fly Category Discovery

    Mar 9, 2026Yanan Wu, Yuhan Yan, Tailai Chen +5Test-Time AdaptationPrototype-Based Classification

    College of Information and Electrical Engineering, China Agricultural University, China · College of Science, China Agricultural University, China · Woof RoboT Co., Ltd., China +4

  17. IMSE: Intrinsic Mixture of Spectral Experts Fine-tuning for Test-Time Adaptation

    Mar 9, 2026Sunghyun Baek, Jaemyung Yu, Seunghee Koh +3Test-Time AdaptationDomain Adaptation

    Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) · LG Energy Solution

  18. Bi-directional digital twin prototype anchoring with multi-periodicity learning for few-shot fault diagnosis

    Mar 7, 2026Pengcheng Xia, Zhichao Dong, Yixiang Huang +3Fault DiagnosisIndustrial Fault Diagnosis

    State Key Laboratory of Mechanical System and Vibration, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, PR China

  19. Shifting Adaptation from Weight Space to Memory Space: A Memory-Augmented Agent for Medical Image Segmentation

    Mar 6, 2026Bowen Chen, Qiaohui Gao, Shaowen Wan +6Medical Image SegmentationFew-Shot Medical Image Segmentation

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA · College of Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115, USA · Department of Biomedical Engineering, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ 07102, USA +4

  20. DiSCTT: Consensus-Guided Self-Curriculum for Efficient Test-Time Adaptation in Reasoning

    Mar 5, 2026Mohammad Mahdi Moradi, Sudhir MudurTest-Time AdaptationSelf-Training for Language Models

    Department of Compute Science, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada.

  21. Boosting ASR Robustness via Test-Time Reinforcement Learning with Audio-Text Semantic Rewards

    Mar 5, 2026Linghan Fang, Tianxin Xie, Li LiuRobust ASRAutomatic Speech Recognition

    The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Guangzhou, China · Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany

  22. Exploiting Intermediate Reconstructions in Optical Coherence Tomography for Test-Time Adaption of Medical Image Segmentation

    Mar 5, 2026Thomas Pinetz, Veit Hucke, Hrvoje BogunovicMedical Image SegmentationTest-Time Adaptation

    Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Center for Medical Data Science, Medical University of Vienna, Austria

  23. FOZO: Forward-Only Zeroth-Order Prompt Optimization for Test-Time Adaptation

    Mar 5, 2026Xingyu Wang, Tao WangTest-Time AdaptationContinual Test-Time Adaptation

    College of Computer Science, Sichuan University

  24. Semantic Bridging Domains: Pseudo-Source as Test-Time Connector

    Mar 4, 2026Xizhong Yang, Huiming Wang, Ning Xu +1Domain AdaptationSource-Free Domain Adaptation

    Southeast University · Kuaishou Technology

  25. When and Where to Reset Matters for Long-Term Test-Time Adaptation

    Mar 4, 2026Taejun Lim, Joong-Won Hwang, Kibok LeeTest-Time AdaptationContinual Test-Time Adaptation

    1Yonsei University · 2ETRI

  26. Test-Time Meta-Adaptation with Self-Synthesis

    Mar 3, 2026Zeyneb N. Kaya, Nick RuiInference-Time Adaptation of Language ModelsTest-Time Adaptation

    Stanford University

  27. TARSE: Test-Time Adaptation via Retrieval of Skills and Experience for Reasoning Agents

    Mar 1, 2026Junda Wang, Zonghai Tao, Hansi Zeng +3Clinical QALLM Agent Skill Retrieval

    University of Massachusetts Amherst, MA, USA · University of Massachusetts Lowell, MA, USA

  28. Decoupling Stability and Plasticity for Multi-Modal Test-Time Adaptation

    Feb 28, 2026Yongbo He, Zirun Guo, Tao JinTest-Time AdaptationTest-Time Adaptation of VLMs

    Zhejiang University

  29. ProtoDCS: Towards Robust and Efficient Open-Set Test-Time Adaptation for Vision-Language Models

    Feb 27, 2026Wei Luo, Yangfan Ou, Jin Deng +4VLM RobustnessTest-Time Adaptation

    South China Agricultural University · Pazhou Laboratory · South China University of Technology +1

  30. WARM-CAT: Warm-Started Test-Time Comprehensive Knowledge Accumulation for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning

    Feb 26, 2026Xudong Yan, Songhe Feng, Jiaxin Wang +2Zero-Shot LearningTest-Time Adaptation

    School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China