6.2CVDec 14, 2025
From Tokens to Photons: Test-Time Physical Prompting for Vision-Language ModelsBoyeong Im, Wooseok Lee, Yoojin Kwon et al.
To extend the application of vision-language models (VLMs) from web images to sensor-mediated physical environments, we propose Multi-View Physical-prompt for Test-Time Adaptation (MVP), a forward-only framework that moves test-time adaptation (TTA) from tokens to photons by treating the camera exposure triangle--ISO, shutter speed, and aperture--as physical prompts. At inference, MVP acquires a library of physical views per scene, selects the top-k sensor settings using a source-affinity score, evaluates each retained view under lightweight digital augmentations, filters the lowest-entropy subset of augmented views, and aggregates predictions with Zero-temperature softmax (i.e., hard voting). This selection-then-vote design is simple, calibration-friendly, and requires no gradients or model modifications. On ImageNet-ES and ImageNet-ES-Diverse, MVP consistently outperforms digital-only TTA on single Auto-Exposure captures, by up to 25.6 percentage points (pp), and delivers up to 3.4 pp additional gains over pipelines that combine conventional sensor control with TTA. MVP remains effective under reduced parameter candidate sets that lower capture latency, demonstrating practicality. These results support the main claim that, beyond post-capture prompting, measurement-time control--selecting and combining real physical views--substantially improves robustness for VLMs.
8.2AIMar 18
CORE: Robust Out-of-Distribution Detection via Confidence and Orthogonal Residual ScoringJin Mo Yang, Hyung-Sin Kim, Saewoong Bahk
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is essential for deploying deep learning models reliably, yet no single method performs consistently across architectures and datasets -- a scorer that leads on one benchmark often falters on another. We attribute this inconsistency to a shared structural limitation: logit-based methods see only the classifier's confidence signal, while feature-based methods attempt to measure membership in the training distribution but do so in the full feature space where confidence and membership are entangled, inheriting architecture-sensitive failure modes. We observe that penultimate features naturally decompose into two orthogonal subspaces: a classifier-aligned component encoding confidence, and a residual the classifier discards. We discover that this residual carries a class-specific directional signature for in-distribution data -- a membership signal invisible to logit-based methods and entangled with noise in feature-based methods. We propose CORE (COnfidence + REsidual), which disentangles the two signals by scoring each subspace independently and combines them via normalized summation. Because the two signals are orthogonal by construction, their failure modes are approximately independent, producing robust detection where either view alone is unreliable. CORE achieves competitive or state-of-the-art performance across five architectures and five benchmark configurations, ranking first in three of five settings and achieving the highest grand average AUROC with negligible computational overhead.
6.3CVMar 16
Tracking the Discriminative Axis: Dual Prototypes for Test-Time OOD Detection Under Covariate ShiftWooseok Lee, Jin Mo Yang, Saewoong Bahk et al.
For reliable deployment of deep-learning systems, out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is indispensable. In the real world, where test-time inputs often arrive as streaming mixtures of in-distribution (ID) and OOD samples under evolving covariate shifts, OOD samples are domain-constrained and bounded by the environment, and both ID and OOD are jointly affected by the same covariate factors. Existing methods typically assume a stationary ID distribution, but this assumption breaks down in such settings, leading to severe performance degradation. We empirically discover that, even under covariate shift, covariate-shifted ID (csID) and OOD (csOOD) samples remain separable along a discriminative axis in feature space. Building on this observation, we propose DART, a test-time, online OOD detection method that dynamically tracks dual prototypes -- one for ID and the other for OOD -- to recover the drifting discriminative axis, augmented with multi-layer fusion and flip correction for robustness. Extensive experiments on a wide range of challenging benchmarks, where all datasets are subjected to 15 common corruption types at severity level 5, demonstrate that our method significantly improves performance, yielding 15.32 percentage points (pp) AUROC gain and 49.15 pp FPR@95TPR reduction on ImageNet-C vs. Textures-C compared to established baselines. These results highlight the potential of the test-time discriminative axis tracking for dependable OOD detection in dynamically changing environments.