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. VLMs are Good Teachers for Video Reasoning via Adaptive Test-Time Optimization

    Jun 1, 2026Junhao Cheng, Liang Hou, Tianxiong Zhong +4Test-Time AdaptationVideo Diffusion Models

    City University of Hong Kong · Kling Team, Kuaishou Technology

  2. PRIMA: Boosting Animal Mesh Recovery with Taxonomic Priors and Adaptation-Driven Data Bootstrapping

    Jun 1, 2026Xiaohang Yu, Ti Wang, Mackenzie Weygandt MathisTest-Time Adaptation3D Reconstruction

    ´Ecole Polytechnique F´ed´erale de Lausanne (EPFL)

  3. Entropy Minimization without Model Collapse: Mitigating Prediction Bias in Medical Imaging

    Jun 1, 2026Tim Nielen, Sameer Ambekar, Johannes Kiechle +2Distribution Shift RobustnessTest-Time Adaptation

    School of Computation, Information and Technology, Technical University of Munich, Germany · Institute of Machine Learning in Biomedical Imaging, Helmholtz Munich, Germany · Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML) +3

  4. A Closer Look at In-Distribution vs. Out-of-Distribution Accuracy for Open-Set Test-time Adaptation

    Jun 1, 2026Zefeng Li, Evan ShelhamerTest-Time AdaptationOpen-Set Recognition

    University of British Columbia and Vector Institute

  5. Temporal Motif-aware Graph Test-time Adaptation for OOD Blockchain Anomaly Detection

    May 28, 2026Runang He, Tongya Zheng, Huiling Peng +6Temporal GNNsTest-Time Adaptation

    State Key Laboratory of Blockchain and Data Security, Zhejiang University · Zhejiang Provincial Engineering Research Center for Real-Time SmartTech in Urban Security Governance, Hangzhou City University · Hangzhou High-Tech Zone (Binjiang) Institute of Blockchain and Data Security

  6. On the Learnability of Test-Time Adaptation: A Recovery Complexity Perspective

    May 27, 2026Zhi Zhou, Ming Yang, Shi-Yu Tian +3Test-Time AdaptationDistribution Shift

    State Key Laboratory of Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, China · School of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing University, China · School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Nanjing University, China

  7. Respecting Modality Gap in Post-hoc Out-of-distribution Detection with Pre-trained Vision-Language Models

    May 26, 2026Yuanwei Hu, Bo Peng, Yadan Luo +3Vision-Language ModelsTest-Time Adaptation

    University of Technology Sydney · The University of Queensland

  8. In-Context Optimization for Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Gradient-Descent Perspective

    May 25, 2026Mingchen Li, Jiatan Huang, Chuxu Zhang +2Retrieval-Augmented GenerationTest-Time Adaptation

    University of Massachusetts, Amherst · University of Connecticut · Emory University

  9. Hierarchical Consistency Learning for Test-time Adaptation in Camouflage Perception

    May 25, 2026Mingfeng Zha, Tianyu Li, Guoqing Wang +5Test-Time AdaptationConsistency Regularization

    Center for Future Media and School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China · School of Computer Science and Technology, Tongji University, Shanghai 201804, China · Peng Cheng Laboratory, Shenzhen 518066, China

  10. UAV-OVO: Out-of-Viewpoint Generalization in UAV Action Recognition

    May 25, 2026Yu Xia, Zhengbo Zhang, Shuaihu Zhang +1Test-Time AdaptationOOD Generalization

    Wuhan University · Singapore University of Technology and Design

  11. Test-Time Self-Adaptive Conditioning for Stable Audio-Driven Talking-Head Generation

    May 25, 2026Zhicheng Zhang, Lei Wang, Yu Zhang +1Test-Time AdaptationTalking Head Generation

    School of Business, University of New South Wales (UNSW), Australia · School of Engineering and Built Environment, Griffith University, Australia

  12. EgoAdapt: A Multi-Scene Egocentric Adaptation Method for CVPR 2026 HD-EPIC VQA Challenge

    May 23, 2026Zhiwei Chen, Yupeng Hu, Zixu Li +4Test-Time AdaptationVLM Adaptation

    Shandong University · Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)

  13. Sample-wise Targeted Adversarial Attacks on Test-time Adaptation

    May 22, 2026Phuc Duc Nguyen, Quang Duc NguyenTest-Time AdaptationAdversarial Attacks

    College of Computing and Data Science Nanyang Technological University Singapore

  14. Certifying Whether to Adapt: Baseline-Relative PAC-Bayes-MMD Guarantees for Test-Time Adaptation

    May 20, 2026Ahanaf Hasan Ariq, Hasaan Ahmad, Aayush Parekh +1Distribution Shift RobustnessPAC-Bayesian Generalization Bounds

    Ideal School and College

  15. SkySeg: Collaborative Onboard Semantic Segmentation with Heterogeneous UAVs in the Wild

    May 20, 2026Anqi Lu, Yun Cheng, Youbing Hu +3Test-Time AdaptationMulti-Robot Systems

    Harbin Institute of Technology Harbin, China · ETH Zurich Zurich, Switzerland · Huawei Cloud Algorithm Innovation Lab Be, China

  16. Towards Fine-Grained Robustness: Attention-Guided Test-Time Prompt Tuning for Vision-Language Models

    May 19, 2026Jia-Wei Hai, Yijun Wang, Xiu-Shen WeiVLM RobustnessAdversarial Attacks on VLMs

    School of Computer Science and Engineering, and Key Laboratory of New Generation Artificial Intelligence Technology and Its Interdisciplinary Applications, Southeast University, China. · School of Intelligence Science and Engineering, Southeast University, China.

  17. GoTTA be Diverse: Rethinking Memory Policies for Test-Time Adaptation

    May 19, 2026Shyma Alhuwaider, Yasmeen Alsaedy, Merey Ramazanova +2Test-Time AdaptationContinual Test-Time Adaptation

    Center of Excellence in Generative AI, KAUST, Saudi Arabia

  18. Dance Across Shifts: Forward-Facilitation Continual Test-Time Adaptation through Dynamic Style Bridging

    May 18, 2026Zhilin Zhu, Yabin Wang, Zhiheng Ma +3Distribution Shift RobustnessTest-Time Adaptation

    Harbin Institute of Technology · Pengcheng Laboratory · Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology +1

  19. TAME: Test-Time Adversarial Prompt Tuning via Mixture-of-Experts for Vision-Language Models

    May 17, 2026Xin Wang, Yixu Wang, Jiaming Zhang +6Adversarial Attacks on VLMsTest-Time Adaptation

  20. VISTA: Variance-Gated Inter-Sequence Test-Time Adaptation for Multi-Sequence MRI Segmentation

    May 17, 2026Zhipeng Deng, Jiale Zhou, Wenhan Jiang +4Multi-View ConsistencyTest-Time Adaptation

    Westlake University, Hangzhou, China · Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan · The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China +1

  21. Towards Principled Test-Time Adaptation for Time Series Forecasting

    May 17, 2026Haochun Wang, Ruichen Xu, Georgios Kementzidis +3Test-Time AdaptationTime Series Forecasting

    Stony Brook University

  22. Skills on the Fly: Test-Time Adaptive Skill Synthesis for LLM Agents

    May 16, 2026Jingxing Wang, Chenyu Zhou, Zhihui Fu +4Test-Time AdaptationLLM Agent Skill Learning

    1Shanghai Jiao Tong University · 2OPPO Research Institute

  23. EVA-0: Test-Time Model Evolution with Only Two Forward Passes per Sample

    May 15, 2026Guohao Chen, Shuaicheng Niu, Geng Li +4Efficient Neural Network InferenceTest-Time Adaptation

    Nanyang Technological University · Tulane University

  24. Reliability-Gated Source Anchoring for Continual Test-Time Adaptation

    May 13, 2026Vikash Singh, Debargha Ganguly, Weicong Chen +8Test-Time AdaptationContinual Test-Time Adaptation

    1Case Western Reserve University · 2Université Laval · 3Mila - Québec AI Institute

  25. Neural Video Compression with Domain Transfer

    May 13, 2026Tiange Zhang, Rongqun Lin, Xiandong Meng +4Test-Time AdaptationCross-Domain Transfer Learning

    Shenzhen Graduate School, Peking University, Shenzhen, China · Pengcheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, China · School of Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing, China

  26. Query-Conditioned Test-Time Self-Training for Large Language Models

    May 13, 2026Chaehee Song, Minseok Seo, Yeeun Seong +2Test-Time AdaptationTest-Time Optimization

    School of Electrical Engineering, KAIST · 2Graduate School of Green Growth and Sustainability, KAIST

  27. Coherence-Guided Pyramid Self-Contrastive Disentanglement for Ultrasound Imaging via Single-Shot Test-Time Training

    May 12, 2026Jiajing Zhang, Bingze Dai, Xi Zhang +2Self-Supervised Image DenoisingTest-Time Adaptation

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. · Department of Biomedical Engineering, Duke University, North Carolina, United States.

  28. WildRelight: A Real-World Benchmark and Physics-Guided Adaptation for Single-Image Relighting

    May 12, 2026Lezhong Wang, Mehmet Onurcan Kaya, Siavash Bigdeli +1Synthetic-to-Real Domain AdaptationTest-Time Adaptation

    Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark

  29. TINS: Test-time ID-prototype-separated Negative Semantics Learning for OOD Detection

    May 11, 2026Yifeng Yang, Jubo Feng, Jing Xu +3Test-Time AdaptationOOD Detection

    Shanghai Jiao Tong University · University of Electronic Science and Technology of China · Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory +1

  30. When Normality Shifts: Risk-Aware Test-Time Adaptation for Unsupervised Tabular Anomaly Detection

    May 11, 2026Wei Huang, Hezhe Qiao, Kailai Zhang +3Test-Time AdaptationTabular Anomaly Detection