test-time training

Test-time adaptation (TTA) intends to adapt the pre-trained model to test distributions with only unlabeled test data streams. Most of the previous TTA methods have achieved great success on simple test data streams such as independently sampled data from single or multiple distributions. However, these attempts may fail in dynamic scenarios of real-world applications like autonomous driving, where the environments gradually change and the test data is sampled correlatively over time. In this work, we explore such practical test data streams to deploy the model on the fly, namely practical test-time adaptation (PTTA). To do so, we elaborate a Robust Test-Time Adaptation (RoTTA) method against the complex data stream in PTTA. More specifically, we present a robust batch normalization scheme to estimate the normalization statistics. Meanwhile, a memory bank is utilized to sample category-balanced data with consideration of timeliness and uncertainty. Further, to stabilize the training procedure, we develop a time-aware reweighting strategy with a teacher-student model. Extensive experiments prove that RoTTA enables continual test-time adaptation on the correlatively sampled data streams. Our method is easy to implement, making it a good choice for rapid deployment. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/BIT-DA/RoTTA

Training state-of-the-art vision models has become pro-hibitively expensive for researchers and practitioners. For the sake of accessibility and resource reuse, it is important to focus on adapting these models to a variety of down-stream scenarios. An interesting and practical paradigm is online test-time adaptation, according to which training data is inaccessible, no labelled data from the test distribution is available, and adaptation can only happen at test time and on a handful of samples. In this paper, we investigate how test-time adaptation methods fare for a number of pre-trained models on a variety of real-world scenarios, significantly extending the way they have been originally evaluated. We show that they perform well only in narrowly-defined experimental setups and sometimes fail catastrophically when their hyperparameters are not selected for the same scenario in which they are being tested. Motivated by the inherent uncertainty around the conditions that will ultimately be encountered at test time, we propose a particularly “conservative” approach, which addresses the problem with a Laplacian Adjusted Maximum-likelihood Estimation (LAME) objective. By adapting the model’s output (not its parameters), and solving our objective with an efficient concave-convex procedure, our approach exhibits a much higher average accuracy across scenarios than existing methods, while being notably faster and have a much lower memory footprint. The code is available at https://github.com/fiveai/LAME.

Deep learning based image reconstruction methods outperform traditional methods. However, neural networks suffer from a performance drop when applied to images from a different distribution than the training images. For example, a model trained for reconstructing knees in accelerated magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) does not reconstruct brains well, even though the same network trained on brains reconstructs brains perfectly well. Thus there is a distribution shift performance gap for a given neural network, defined as the difference in performance when training on a distribution P and training on another distribution Q, and evaluating both models on Q. In this work, we propose a domain adaptation method for deep learning based compressive sensing that relies on self-supervision during training paired with test-time training at inference. We show that for four natural distribution shifts, this method essentially closes the distribution shift performance gap for state-of-the-art architectures for accelerated MRI.

Self-attention performs well in long context but has quadratic complexity. Existing RNN layers have linear complexity, but their performance in long context is limited by the expressive power of their hidden states. We present a practical framework for instantiating sequence modeling layers with linear complexity and expressive hidden states. The key idea is to make the hidden state a machine learning model itself, and the update rule a step of self-supervised learning. Since the hidden state is updated by training even on test sequences, our layers are called Test-Time Training (TTT) layers. We consider two instantiations: TTT-Linear and TTT-MLP, whose hidden state is a linear model and a two-layer MLP respectively. We evaluate our instantiations at the scale of 125M to 1.3B parameters, comparing with a strong Transformer and Mamba, a modern RNN. Similar to Transformer, TTT-Linear and TTT-MLP can keep reducing perplexity by conditioning on more tokens, while Mamba cannot after 16k context. TTT-MLP still faces challenges in memory I/O, but shows larger potential in long context, pointing to a promising direction for future research.

Test-time domain adaptation aims to adapt a source pre-trained model to a target domain without using any source data. Existing works mainly consider the case where the target domain is static. However, real-world machine perception systems are running in non-stationary and continually changing environments where the target domain distribution can change over time. Existing methods, which are mostly based on self-training and entropy regularization, can suffer from these non-stationary environments. Due to the distribution shift over time in the target domain, pseudo-labels become unreliable. The noisy pseudo-labels can further lead to error accumulation and catastrophic forgetting. To tackle these issues, we propose a continual test-time adaptation approach~(CoTTA) which comprises two parts. Firstly, we propose to reduce the error accumulation by using weight-averaged and augmentation-averaged predictions which are often more accurate. On the other hand, to avoid catastrophic forgetting, we propose to stochastically restore a small part of the neurons to the source pre-trained weights during each iteration to help preserve source knowledge in the long-term. The proposed method enables the long-term adaptation for all parameters in the network. CoTTA is easy to implement and can be readily incorporated in off-the-shelf pre-trained models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on four classification tasks and a segmentation task for continual test-time adaptation, on which we outperform existing methods. Our code is available at \url{this https URL}.

Language models (LMs) have shown impressive performance on tasks within their training distribution, but often struggle with structurally novel tasks even when given a small number of in-context task examples. We investigate the effectiveness of test-time training (TTT)—temporarily updating model parameters during inference using a loss derived from in-context examples—as a mechanism for improving LMs’ reasoning and few-shot learning capabilities. On the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC), performing TTT with in-context examples yields up to 6× higher accuracy compared to fine-tuned baselines—reaching 53.0% on the public validation set with an 8B-parameter LM and 61.9% when ensembled with program-synthesis methods, matching average human performance. On BIG-Bench Hard (BBH), TTT on in-context examples surpasses standard few-shot prompting in the 10-shot setting by 7.3 percentage points (50.5% to 57.8%). Our findings highlight the limitations of in-context learning for novel tasks and demonstrate the potential of test-time training to enhance language model adaptability.

Test-time training adapts to a new test distribution on the fly by optimizing a model for each test input using self-supervision. In this paper, we use masked autoencoders for this one-sample learning problem. Empirically, our simple method improves generalization on many visual benchmarks for distribution shifts. Theoretically, we characterize this improvement in terms of the bias-variance trade-off.

Since experiencing domain shifts during test-time is inevitable in practice, test-time adaption (TTA) continues to adapt the model after deployment. Recently, the area of continual and gradual test-time adaptation (TTA) emerged. In contrast to standard TTA, continual TTA considers not only a single domain shift, but a sequence of shifts. Gradual TTA further exploits the property that some shifts evolve gradually over time. Since in both settings long test sequences are present, error accumulation needs to be addressed for methods relying on self-training. In this work, we propose and show that in the setting of TTA, the symmetric cross-entropy is better suited as a consistency loss for mean teachers compared to the commonly used cross-entropy. This is justified by our analysis with respect to the (symmetric) cross-entropy's gradient properties. To pull the test feature space closer to the source domain, where the pre-trained model is well posed, contrastive learning is leveraged. Since applications differ in their requirements, we address several settings, including having source data available and the more challenging source-free setting. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method “robust mean teacher“ (RMT) on the continual and gradual corruption benchmarks CIFAR10C, CIFAR100C, and Imagenet-C. We further consider ImageNet-R and propose a new continual DomainNet-126 benchmark. State-of-the-art results are achieved on all benchmarks.