# TestDG: Test-time Domain Generalization for Continual Test-time Adaptation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.04981 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04981/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 79 of its 92 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 79)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
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- [Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03741/) (2017)
- [Training a Helpful and Harmless Assistant with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05862/) (2022)
- [Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15043/) (2023)
- [Learning to summarize from human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.01325/) (2020)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18223/) (2023)
- [Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07682/) (2022)
- [Jailbroken: How Does LLM Safety Training Fail?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02483/) (2023)
- [Jailbreaking Black Box Large Language Models in Twenty Queries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08419/) (2023)
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- [AutoDAN: Generating Stealthy Jailbreak Prompts on Aligned Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04451/) (2023)
- [Tree of Attacks: Jailbreaking Black-Box LLMs Automatically](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02119/) (2023)
- [How Johnny Can Persuade LLMs to Jailbreak Them: Rethinking Persuasion to Challenge AI Safety by Humanizing LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06373/) (2024)
- [Jailbreaking ChatGPT via Prompt Engineering: An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13860/) (2023)
- ["Do Anything Now": Characterizing and Evaluating In-The-Wild Jailbreak Prompts on Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03825/) (2023)
- [Jailbreaking Leading Safety-Aligned LLMs with Simple Adaptive Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02151/) (2024)
- [Catastrophic Jailbreak of Open-source LLMs via Exploiting Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06987/) (2023)
- [Jailbreak and Guard Aligned Language Models with Only Few In-Context Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06387/) (2023)
- [GPT-4 Is Too Smart To Be Safe: Stealthy Chat with LLMs via Cipher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06463/) (2023)
- [FigStep: Jailbreaking Large Vision-Language Models via Typographic Visual Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05608/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Large Language Model (LLM) Security and Privacy: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02003/) (2023)
- [DeepInception: Hypnotize Large Language Model to Be Jailbreaker](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03191/) (2023)
- [Multi-step Jailbreaking Privacy Attacks on ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05197/) (2023)
- [Visual Adversarial Examples Jailbreak Aligned Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13213/) (2023)
- [Low-Resource Languages Jailbreak GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02446/) (2023)
- [On Evaluating Adversarial Robustness of Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16934/) (2023)
- [Exploiting Programmatic Behavior of LLMs: Dual-Use Through Standard Security Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05733/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper studies continual test-time adaptation (CTTA), the task of adapting a model to constantly changing unseen domains in testing while preserving previously learned knowledge. Existing CTTA methods mostly focus on adaptation to the current test domain only, overlooking generalization to arbitrary test domains a model may face in the future. To tackle this limitation, we present a novel online test-time domain generalization framework for CTTA, dubbed TestDG. TestDG aims to learn features invariant to both current and previous test domains on the fly during testing, improving the potential for effective generalization to future domains. To this end, we propose a new model architecture and a test-time adaptation strategy dedicated to learning domain-invariant features, along with prototype selection and update mechanisms for effectively managing information from previous test domains. TestDG achieved state of the art on four public CTTA benchmarks. Moreover, it showed superior generalization to unseen test domains.
