Test-Time Adaptation

Ask about this topic

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. The Mean is the Mirage: Entropy-Adaptive Model Merging under Heterogeneous Domain Shifts in Medical Imaging

    Feb 24, 2026Sameer Ambekar, Reza Nasirigerdeh, Peter J. Schuffler +3Model MergingDomain Generalization

    School of Computation, Information and Technology, Technical University of Munich, Germany · Institute of Machine Learning in Biomedical Imaging, Helmholtz Munich, Germany · relAI – Konrad Zuse School of Excellence in Reliable AI +3

  2. HD-TTA: Hypothesis-Driven Test-Time Adaptation for Safer Brain Tumor Segmentation

    Feb 23, 2026Kartik Jhawar, Lipo WangTest-Time AdaptationMedical Image Segmentation

  3. From Subtle to Significant: Prompt-Driven Self-Improving Optimization in Test-Time Graph OOD Detection

    Feb 19, 2026Luzhi Wang, Xuanshuo Fu, He Zhang +3Graph Prompt LearningOOD Detection

    College of Artificial Intelligence, Dalian Maritime University · Computer Vision Center, Universitat Aut`onoma de Barcelona · School of Computing Technologies, RMIT University +1

  4. Stabilizing Test-Time Adaptation of High-Dimensional Simulation Surrogates via D-Optimal Statistics

    Feb 17, 2026Anna Zimmel, Paul Setinek, Gianluca Galletti +2Test-Time AdaptationOOD Generalization

    ELLIS Unit, LIT AI Lab, Institute for Machine Learning, JKU Linz, Austria · Emmi AI GmbH, Linz, Austria

  5. Recursive Concept Evolution for Compositional Reasoning in Large Language Models

    Feb 17, 2026Sarim ChaudhryCompositional ReasoningTest-Time Adaptation

    Purdue University

  6. Depth Completion as Parameter-Efficient Test-Time Adaptation

    Feb 16, 2026Bingxin Ke, Qunjie Zhou, Jiahui Huang +5Depth CompletionTest-Time Adaptation

    NVIDIA · ETH Zürich

  7. Precedent-Informed Reasoning: Mitigating Overthinking in Large Reasoning Models via Test-Time Precedent Learning

    Feb 16, 2026Qianyue Wang, Jinwu Hu, Huanxiang Lin +5Efficient Language Model ReasoningOverthinking in Language Models

    South China University of Technology · Pazhou Laboratory · DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group

  8. MMEarth-Bench: Global Model Adaptation via Multimodal Test-Time Training

    Feb 6, 2026Lucia Gordon, Serge Belongie, Christian Igel +1Test-Time AdaptationMultimodal Robustness

    Harvard University, USA · University of Copenhagen, Denmark

  9. Predict the Retrieval! Test time adaptation for Retrieval Augmented Generation

    Jan 16, 2026Xin Sun, Zhongqi Chen, Qiang Liu +5Retrieval-Augmented GenerationTest-Time Adaptation

    NLPR, MAIS, CASIA · Ant Group · USTC

  10. Lightweight Test-Time Adaptation for EMG-Based Gesture Recognition

    Jan 7, 2026Nia Touko, Matthew O A Ellis, Cristiano Capone +3EMG-Based Gesture RecognitionTest-Time Adaptation

    School of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, S10 2TN, United Kingdom · Natl. Center for Radiation Protection and Computational Physics, Istituto Superiore di Sanità, 00161 Rome, Italy · Politecnico di Torino, Italy +1

  11. DHAuDS: A Dynamic and Heterogeneous Audio Benchmark for Test-Time Adaptation

    Nov 23, 2025Weichuang Shao, Iman Yi Liao, Tomas Henrique Bode Maul +1Test-Time AdaptationNeural Network Robustness

    School of Computer and Mathematical Sciences, University of Nottingham Malaysia, Semenyih, Malaysia

  12. Efficient Test-Time Adaptation through Latent Subspace Coefficients Search

    Oct 13, 2025Xinyu Luo, Jie Liu, Kecheng Chen +6Test-Time AdaptationContinual Test-Time Adaptation

    Department of Electrical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China

  13. VLOD-TTA: Test-Time Adaptation of Vision-Language Object Detectors

    Oct 1, 2025Atif Belal, Heitor R. Medeiros, Marco Pedersoli +1Open-Vocabulary Object DetectionVLM Robustness

    LIVIA, ILLS, Dept. of Systems Engineering, ETS Montréal, Canada

  14. CPATTA: Conformal Supervision Allocation For Active Test-Time Adaptation

    Sep 30, 2025Tingyu Shi, Fan Lyu, Haihua Zhu +2Distribution Shift RobustnessTest-Time Adaptation

    Computer Science and Engineering, University of California San Diego · New Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences · College of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, Hunan University

  15. SlowFast-SCI: Slow-Fast Deep Unfolding Learning for Spectral Compressive Imaging

    Sep 20, 2025Haijin Zeng, Xuan Lu, Jiezhang Cao +8Image ReconstructionComputational Imaging

    Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen · The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen · Shanghai Jiaotong University +3

  16. Uniformity First: Uniformity-aware Test-time Adaptation of Vision-language Models against Image Corruption

    May 19, 2025Kazuki Adachi, Shin'ya Yamaguchi, Tomoki HamagamiTest-Time AdaptationImage Corruption Robustness

    NTT, Inc. · Yokohama National University

  17. Focus on Likely Classes for Test-Time Prediction

    May 2, 2025Johannes SchneiderTest-Time AdaptationMulticlass Classification

    Department of Computer Science and Information Systems University of Liechtenstein Vaduz, Liechtenstein

  18. EmbodiTTA: Resource-Efficient Test-Time Adaptation for Embodied Visual Systems

    May 2, 2025Xiao Ma, Young D. Kwon, Dong MaTest-Time AdaptationContinual Test-Time Adaptation

    Singapore Management University, Singapore · Samsung AI Center–Cambridge, United Kingdom · University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

  19. LeanTTA: A Backpropagation-Free and Stateless Approach to Quantized Test-Time Adaptation on Edge Devices

    Mar 20, 2025Cynthia Dong, Hong Jia, Young D. Kwon +2Test-Time AdaptationEdge Inference

  20. Data Alchemy: Mitigating Cross-Site Model Variability Through Test Time Data Calibration

    Jul 18, 2024Abhijeet Parida, Antonia Alomar, Zhifan Jiang +7Image EnhancementTest-Time Adaptation

    Children’s National Hospital, Washington, DC, USA · Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain · Universidad Polit´ecnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain +2

  21. Seeing Through Uncertainty: Free-Energy-Inspired Real-Time Adaptation for Robust Visual Navigation

    Mar 4, 2024Maytus Piriyajitakonkij, Rishabh Dev Yadav, Mingfei Sun +2Visual NavigationTest-Time Adaptation

    Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, United Kingdom · College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore · Institute of Advanced Intelligence and Computing (IAIC), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore

  22. DIRA-SS:Dynamic Domain Incremental Regularised Adaptation -- Self-Supervised

    Nov 13, 2023Abanoub Ghobrial, Kerstin EderTest-Time AdaptationUnsupervised Domain Adaptation

    University of Bristol, Bristol, UK