# FIESTA: Fisher Information-based Efficient Selective Test-time Adaptation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23257 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23257/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09282/) (2016)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [Experience Replay for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11682/) (2018)
- [Learning Imbalanced Datasets with Label-Distribution-Aware Margin Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07413/) (2019)
- [Do We Really Need to Access the Source Data? Source Hypothesis Transfer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08546/) (2020)
- [Weight Normalization: A Simple Reparameterization to Accelerate Training of Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07868/) (2016)
- [Continual Test-Time Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13591/) (2022)
- [AffectNet: A Database for Facial Expression, Valence, and Arousal Computing in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03985/) (2017)
- [Efficient Test-Time Model Adaptation without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02610/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Orthogonal Gradient Descent for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07104/) (2019)
- [Revisiting Batch Normalization For Practical Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.04779/) (2016)
- [Expression, Affect, Action Unit Recognition: Aff-Wild2, Multi-Task Learning and ArcFace](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04855/) (2019)
- [Deep Affect Prediction in-the-wild: Aff-Wild Database and Challenge, Deep Architectures, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.10938/) (2018)
- [Adaptive Risk Minimization: Learning to Adapt to Domain Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02931/) (2020)
- [Analysing Affective Behavior in the First ABAW 2020 Competition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.11409/) (2020)
- [Affect Analysis in-the-wild: Valence-Arousal, Expressions, Action Units and a Unified Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15792/) (2021)
- [Distribution Matching for Heterogeneous Multi-Task Learning: a Large-scale Face Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03790/) (2021)
- [Analysing Affective Behavior in the second ABAW2 Competition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15318/) (2021)
- [Revisiting Natural Gradient for Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3584/) (2013)
- [ABAW: Valence-Arousal Estimation, Expression Recognition, Action Unit Detection & Multi-Task Learning Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10659/) (2022)
- [Face Behavior a la carte: Expressions, Affect and Action Units in a Single Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11111/) (2019)
- [NOTE: Robust Continual Test-time Adaptation Against Temporal Correlation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05117/) (2022)
- [Robust Learning with Jacobian Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02729/) (2019)

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

- [A Survey on Self-Improving Test-Time Intelligence: Feedback-Driven Adapting, Learning, and Scaling at Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01679/) (2026)
- [Fine-tuning a multimodal large language model for clinician-grade autism behavioral scoring from short home videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.27484/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Robust facial expression recognition in unconstrained, "in-the-wild" environments remains challenging due to significant domain shifts between training and testing distributions. Test-time adaptation (TTA) offers a promising solution by adapting pre-trained models during inference without requiring labeled test data. However, existing TTA approaches typically rely on manually selecting which parameters to update, potentially leading to suboptimal adaptation and high computational costs. This paper introduces a novel Fisher-driven selective adaptation framework that dynamically identifies and updates only the most critical model parameters based on their importance as quantified by Fisher information. By integrating this principled parameter selection approach with temporal consistency constraints, our method enables efficient and effective adaptation specifically tailored for video-based facial expression recognition. Experiments on the challenging AffWild2 benchmark demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing TTA methods, achieving a 7.7% improvement in F1 score over the base model while adapting only 22,000 parameters-more than 20 times fewer than comparable methods. Our ablation studies further reveal that parameter importance can be effectively estimated from minimal data, with sampling just 1-3 frames sufficient for substantial performance gains. The proposed approach not only enhances recognition accuracy but also dramatically reduces computational overhead, making test-time adaptation more practical for real-world affective computing applications.