Feature Alignment and Uniformity for Test Time Adaptation
This addresses the problem of adapting models to new domains during inference for researchers and practitioners in computer vision, though it is incremental as it builds on existing TTA frameworks.
The paper tackles test time adaptation (TTA) for deep neural networks on out-of-distribution test samples by proposing strategies for feature uniformity and alignment, including self-distillation and spatial clustering, and shows it improves baselines and outperforms state-of-the-art methods on domain generalization benchmarks and medical image segmentation tasks.
Test time adaptation (TTA) aims to adapt deep neural networks when receiving out of distribution test domain samples. In this setting, the model can only access online unlabeled test samples and pre-trained models on the training domains. We first address TTA as a feature revision problem due to the domain gap between source domains and target domains. After that, we follow the two measurements alignment and uniformity to discuss the test time feature revision. For test time feature uniformity, we propose a test time self-distillation strategy to guarantee the consistency of uniformity between representations of the current batch and all the previous batches. For test time feature alignment, we propose a memorized spatial local clustering strategy to align the representations among the neighborhood samples for the upcoming batch. To deal with the common noisy label problem, we propound the entropy and consistency filters to select and drop the possible noisy labels. To prove the scalability and efficacy of our method, we conduct experiments on four domain generalization benchmarks and four medical image segmentation tasks with various backbones. Experiment results show that our method not only improves baseline stably but also outperforms existing state-of-the-art test time adaptation methods. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/SakurajimaMaiii/TSD}{https://github.com/SakurajimaMaiii/TSD}.