# pSTarC: Pseudo Source Guided Target Clustering for Fully Test-Time Adaptation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.00846 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00846/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [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)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [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)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [Moment Matching for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01754/) (2018)
- [Deep Hashing Network for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07522/) (2017)
- [Do We Really Need to Access the Source Data? Source Hypothesis Transfer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08546/) (2020)
- [Continual Test-Time Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13591/) (2022)
- [Efficient Test-Time Model Adaptation without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02610/) (2022)
- [VisDA: The Visual Domain Adaptation Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.06924/) (2017)
- [Improving robustness against common corruptions by covariate shift adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16971/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Adaptation Network for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00976/) (2019)
- [Contrastive Test-Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10377/) (2022)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Attracting and Dispersing: A Simple Approach for Source-free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04183/) (2022)
- [C-SFDA: A Curriculum Learning Aided Self-Training Framework for Efficient Source Free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17132/) (2023)
- [IMAGINE: Image Synthesis by Image-Guided Model Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05895/) (2021)
- [NaturalInversion: Data-Free Image Synthesis Improving Real-World Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16661/) (2023)
- [MAGIC: Mask-Guided Image Synthesis by Inverting a Quasi-Robust Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11549/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Efficient Open Set Single Image Test Time Adaptation of Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00481/) (2024)
- [Segmentation Assisted Incremental Test Time Adaptation in an Open World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20029/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Test Time Adaptation (TTA) is a pivotal concept in machine learning, enabling models to perform well in real-world scenarios, where test data distribution differs from training. In this work, we propose a novel approach called pseudo Source guided Target Clustering (pSTarC) addressing the relatively unexplored area of TTA under real-world domain shifts. This method draws inspiration from target clustering techniques and exploits the source classifier for generating pseudo-source samples. The test samples are strategically aligned with these pseudo-source samples, facilitating their clustering and thereby enhancing TTA performance. pSTarC operates solely within the fully test-time adaptation protocol, removing the need for actual source data. Experimental validation on a variety of domain shift datasets, namely VisDA, Office-Home, DomainNet-126, CIFAR-100C verifies pSTarC's effectiveness. This method exhibits significant improvements in prediction accuracy along with efficient computational requirements. Furthermore, we also demonstrate the universality of the pSTarC framework by showing its effectiveness for the continuous TTA framework. The source code for our method is available at https://manogna-s.github.io/pstarc
