# SATA: Source Anchoring and Target Alignment Network for Continual Test Time Adaptation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.10113 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10113/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Knowledge Distillation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05525/) (2020)
- [Can You Trust Your Model's Uncertainty? Evaluating Predictive Uncertainty Under Dataset Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02530/) (2019)
- [Do We Really Need to Access the Source Data? Source Hypothesis Transfer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08546/) (2020)
- [Maximum Classifier Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02560/) (2017)
- [RobustBench: a standardized adversarial robustness benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09670/) (2020)
- [Continual Test-Time Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13591/) (2022)
- [Improving robustness against common corruptions by covariate shift adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16971/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Test-Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10377/) (2022)
- [Universal Source-Free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04393/) (2020)
- [Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02609/) (2022)
- [SelfReg: Self-supervised Contrastive Regularization for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09841/) (2021)
- [Parameter-free Online Test-time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05718/) (2022)
- [Exploiting the Intrinsic Neighborhood Structure for Source-free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04202/) (2021)
- [Generalized Source-free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01614/) (2021)
- [Self-Distillation Amplifies Regularization in Hilbert Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05715/) (2020)
- [Model Adaptation: Historical Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation without Source Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03374/) (2021)
- [NOTE: Robust Continual Test-time Adaptation Against Temporal Correlation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05117/) (2022)
- [Class-Incremental Learning by Knowledge Distillation with Adaptive Feature Consolidation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00895/) (2022)
- [TTN: A Domain-Shift Aware Batch Normalization in Test-Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05155/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Beyond Model Adaptation at Test Time: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03687/) (2024)
- [ViDA: Homeostatic Visual Domain Adapter for Continual Test Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04344/) (2023)
- [In Search of Lost Online Test-time Adaptation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20199/) (2023)
- [Variational Continual Test-Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08182/) (2024)
- [Controllable Continual Test-Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14602/) (2024)
- [Continual Test-Time Adaptation in Computer Vision: Methods, Benchmarks, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.08164/) (2026)
- [CONTRAST: Continual Multi-source Adaptation to Dynamic Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02561/) (2024)
- [Continual Test-Time Adaptation via Entropy Sensitivity-Guidance in Strict Online Setting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29920/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Adapting a trained model to perform satisfactorily on continually changing testing domains/environments is an important and challenging task. In this work, we propose a novel framework, SATA, which aims to satisfy the following characteristics required for online adaptation: 1) can work seamlessly with different (preferably small) batch sizes to reduce latency; 2) should continue to work well for the source domain; 3) should have minimal tunable hyper-parameters and storage requirements. Given a pre-trained network trained on source domain data, the proposed SATA framework modifies the batch-norm affine parameters using source anchoring based self-distillation. This ensures that the model incorporates the knowledge of the newly encountered domains, without catastrophically forgetting about the previously seen ones. We also propose a source-prototype driven contrastive alignment to ensure natural grouping of the target samples, while maintaining the already learnt semantic information. Extensive evaluation on three benchmark datasets under challenging settings justify the effectiveness of SATA for real-world applications.