# Few Clicks Suffice: Active Test-Time Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.01835 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01835/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 51 of its 79 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Segmenter: Transformer for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05633/) (2021)
- [Deep Batch Active Learning by Diverse, Uncertain Gradient Lower Bounds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03671/) (2019)
- [A Survey of Deep Active Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.00236/) (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)
- [Towards Stable Test-Time Adaptation in Dynamic Wild World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12400/) (2023)
- [MEMO: Test Time Robustness via Adaptation and Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09506/) (2021)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Test-Time Adaptation under Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15361/) (2023)
- [Variational Adversarial Active Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00370/) (2019)
- [Evaluating Prediction-Time Batch Normalization for Robustness under Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10963/) (2020)
- [Parameter-free Online Test-time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05718/) (2022)
- [Robust Test-Time Adaptation in Dynamic Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13899/) (2023)
- [Deep Semantic Segmentation of Natural and Medical Images: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07655/) (2019)
- [EcoTTA: Memory-Efficient Continual Test-time Adaptation via Self-distilled Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01904/) (2023)
- [Deep Active Learning for Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.05928/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Decorate the Newcomers: Visual Domain Prompt for Continual Test Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04145/) (2022)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning for Test-time Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04831/) (2022)
- [ViewAL: Active Learning with Viewpoint Entropy for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11789/) (2019)
- [MultiNet: Real-time Joint Semantic Reasoning for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.07695/) (2016)
- [Diverse mini-batch Active Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05954/) (2019)
- [Active Adversarial Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07848/) (2019)
- [Active Domain Adaptation via Clustering Uncertainty-weighted Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08666/) (2020)
- [Improving Test-Time Adaptation via Shift-agnostic Weight Regularization and Nearest Source Prototypes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11707/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [A Survey on Self-Improving Test-Time Intelligence: Feedback-Driven Adapting, Learning, and Scaling at Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01679/) (2026)
- [EviATTA: Evidential Active Test-Time Adaptation for Medical Segment Anything Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14666/) (2026)
- [Towards Continual Test-Time Adaptation of Vision-Language Models in Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29923/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Test-time adaptation (TTA) adapts the pre-trained models during inference using unlabeled test data and has received a lot of research attention due to its potential practical value. Unfortunately, without any label supervision, existing TTA methods rely heavily on heuristic or empirical studies. Where to update the model always falls into suboptimal or brings more computational resource consumption. Meanwhile, there is still a significant performance gap between the TTA approaches and their supervised counterparts. Motivated by active learning, in this work, we propose the active test-time adaptation for semantic segmentation setup. Specifically, we introduce the human-in-the-loop pattern during the testing phase, which queries very few labels to facilitate predictions and model updates in an online manner. To do so, we propose a simple but effective ATASeg framework, which consists of two parts, i.e., model adapter and label annotator. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ATASeg bridges the performance gap between TTA methods and their supervised counterparts with only extremely few annotations, even one click for labeling surpasses known SOTA TTA methods by 2.6% average mIoU on ACDC benchmark. Empirical results imply that progress in either the model adapter or the label annotator will bring improvements to the ATASeg framework, giving it large research and reality potential.