# Continual Test-Time Domain Adaptation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.13591 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13591/

## Key facts

- Cited by 525 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 50 of its 76 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09282/) (2016)
- [iCaRL: Incremental Classifier and Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07725/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [Domain Randomization for Transferring Deep Neural Networks from Simulation to the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06907/) (2017)
- [Continual Lifelong Learning with Neural Networks: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07569/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Features with Deep Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02791/) (2015)
- [CyCADA: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03213/) (2017)
- [AugMix: A Simple Data Processing Method to Improve Robustness and Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02781/) (2019)
- [Do We Really Need to Access the Source Data? Source Hypothesis Transfer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08546/) (2020)
- [RobustBench: a standardized adversarial robustness benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09670/) (2020)
- [Domain Generalization via Invariant Feature Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.2115/) (2013)
- [Learning to Adapt Structured Output Space for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10349/) (2018)
- [FDA: Fourier Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05498/) (2020)
- [Improving robustness against common corruptions by covariate shift adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16971/) (2020)
- [MEMO: Test Time Robustness via Adaptation and Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09506/) (2021)
- [DAFormer: Improving Network Architectures and Training Strategies for Domain-Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14887/) (2021)
- [Training Deep Networks with Synthetic Data: Bridging the Reality Gap by Domain Randomization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06516/) (2018)
- [Revisiting Batch Normalization For Practical Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.04779/) (2016)
- [A Fourier Perspective on Model Robustness in Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08988/) (2019)
- [Universal Source-Free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04393/) (2020)
- [Pitfalls of In-Domain Uncertainty Estimation and Ensembling in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.06470/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 525)

- [Efficient Test-Time Model Adaptation without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02610/) (2022)
- [Towards Stable Test-Time Adaptation in Dynamic Wild World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12400/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Test-Time Adaptation under Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15361/) (2023)
- [Robust Test-Time Adaptation in Dynamic Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13899/) (2023)
- [HRDA: Context-Aware High-Resolution Domain-Adaptive Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13132/) (2022)
- [NOTE: Robust Continual Test-time Adaptation Against Temporal Correlation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05117/) (2022)
- [EcoTTA: Memory-Efficient Continual Test-time Adaptation via Self-distilled Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01904/) (2023)
- [Robust Mean Teacher for Continual and Gradual Test-Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13081/) (2022)
- [TTN: A Domain-Shift Aware Batch Normalization in Test-Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05155/) (2023)
- [Align Your Prompts: Test-Time Prompting with Distribution Alignment for Zero-Shot Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01459/) (2023)
- [Test-Time Adaptation via Conjugate Pseudo-labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09640/) (2022)
- [Decorate the Newcomers: Visual Domain Prompt for Continual Test Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04145/) (2022)
- [Attracting and Dispersing: A Simple Approach for Source-free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04183/) (2022)
- [Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00265/) (2022)
- [Test-Time Model Adaptation with Only Forward Passes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01650/) (2024)
- [DELTA: degradation-free fully test-time adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13018/) (2023)
- [Exponential Moving Average of Weights in Deep Learning: Dynamics and Benefits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18704/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Forgetting in Deep Learning Beyond Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09218/) (2023)
- [Universal Test-time Adaptation through Weight Ensembling, Diversity Weighting, and Prior Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00650/) (2023)
- [On Pitfalls of Test-Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03536/) (2023)
- [SoTTA: Robust Test-Time Adaptation on Noisy Data Streams](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10074/) (2023)
- [A Survey on All-in-One Image Restoration: Taxonomy, Evaluation and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15067/) (2024)
- [ViDA: Homeostatic Visual Domain Adapter for Continual Test Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04344/) (2023)
- [RDumb: A simple approach that questions our progress in continual test-time adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05401/) (2023)
- [Source-free Depth for Object Pop-out](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05370/) (2022)
- [C-SFDA: A Curriculum Learning Aided Self-Training Framework for Efficient Source Free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17132/) (2023)
- [A Probabilistic Framework for Lifelong Test-Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09713/) (2022)
- [Revisiting Realistic Test-Time Training: Sequential Inference and Adaptation by Anchored Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02721/) (2022)
- [In Search of Lost Online Test-time Adaptation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20199/) (2023)
- [Feature Alignment and Uniformity for Test Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10902/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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 urlhttps://qin.ee/cotta.