# Test-time Adaptation with Slot-Centric Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.11194 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11194/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 69 of its 94 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 69)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03828/) (2018)
- [Shortcut Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07780/) (2020)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [pixelNeRF: Neural Radiance Fields from One or Few Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02190/) (2020)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [CLEVR: A Diagnostic Dataset for Compositional Language and Elementary Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.06890/) (2016)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [Object-Centric Learning with Slot Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15055/) (2020)
- [Dynamic Routing Between Capsules](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09829/) (2017)
- [PartNet: A Large-scale Benchmark for Fine-grained and Hierarchical Part-level 3D Object Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02713/) (2018)
- [Meta-Learning for Semi-Supervised Few-Shot Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.00676/) (2018)
- [In-Place Scene Labelling and Understanding with Implicit Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15875/) (2021)
- [MONet: Unsupervised Scene Decomposition and Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11390/) (2019)
- [Kubric: A scalable dataset generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03570/) (2022)
- [Multi-Object Representation Learning with Iterative Variational Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00450/) (2019)
- [An End-to-End Transformer Model for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08141/) (2021)
- [Learning Shape Templates with Structured Implicit Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06447/) (2019)
- [On the Binding Problem in Artificial Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05208/) (2020)
- [GENESIS: Generative Scene Inference and Sampling with Object-Centric Latent Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.13052/) (2019)
- [Scene Representation Transformer: Geometry-Free Novel View Synthesis Through Set-Latent Scene Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13152/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [A Comprehensive Survey on Test-Time Adaptation under Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15361/) (2023)
- [SlotDiffusion: Object-Centric Generative Modeling with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11281/) (2023)
- [TTA-COPE: Test-Time Adaptation for Category-Level Object Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16730/) (2023)
- [Diffusion-TTA: Test-time Adaptation of Discriminative Models via Generative Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16102/) (2023)
- [DORSal: Diffusion for Object-centric Representations of Scenes et al](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08068/) (2023)
- [Is it an i or an l: Test-time Adaptation of Text Line Recognition Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15037/) (2023)
- [Adaptive Cascading Network for Continual Test-Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12240/) (2024)
- [Is Generation Required for Data-Efficient Perception?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08854/) (2025)
- [DenseTRF: Texture-Aware Unsupervised Representation Adaptation for Surgical Scene Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.11265/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current visual detectors, though impressive within their training distribution, often fail to parse out-of-distribution scenes into their constituent entities. Recent test-time adaptation methods use auxiliary self-supervised losses to adapt the network parameters to each test example independently and have shown promising results towards generalization outside the training distribution for the task of image classification. In our work, we find evidence that these losses are insufficient for the task of scene decomposition, without also considering architectural inductive biases. Recent slot-centric generative models attempt to decompose scenes into entities in a self-supervised manner by reconstructing pixels. Drawing upon these two lines of work, we propose Slot-TTA, a semi-supervised slot-centric scene decomposition model that at test time is adapted per scene through gradient descent on reconstruction or cross-view synthesis objectives. We evaluate Slot-TTA across multiple input modalities, images or 3D point clouds, and show substantial out-of-distribution performance improvements against state-of-the-art supervised feed-forward detectors, and alternative test-time adaptation methods.