Improved Self-Training for Test-Time Adaptation

Test-time adaptation (TTA) is a technique to improve the performance of a pre-trained source model on a target distribution without using any labeled data. However, existing self-trained TTA methods often face the challenges of unreliable pseudo-labels and unstable model optimization. In this paper, we propose an Improved Self-Training (IST) approach, which addresses these challenges by enhancing the pseudo-label quality and stabilizing the adaptation process. Specifically, we use a simple augmentation strategy to generate multiple views of each test sample, and construct a graph structure to correct the pseudo-labels based on the similarity of the latent features. Moreover, we adopt a parameter moving average scheme to smooth the model updates and prevent catastrophic forgetting. Instead of using a model with fixed label space, we explore the adaptability of the foundation model CLIP to various downstream tasks at test time. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks show that IST can achieve significant and consistent improvements over the existing TTA methods in classification, detection, and segmentation tasks.