# Contrastive Residual Energy Test-time Adaptation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.19607 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19607/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [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)
- [A Baseline for Detecting Misclassified and Out-of-Distribution Examples in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02136/) (2016)
- [Energy-based Out-of-distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03759/) (2020)
- [Deeper, Broader and Artier Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03077/) (2017)
- [Do We Really Need to Access the Source Data? Source Hypothesis Transfer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08546/) (2020)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Towards Stable Test-Time Adaptation in Dynamic Wild World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12400/) (2023)
- [Your Classifier is Secretly an Energy Based Model and You Should Treat it Like One](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03263/) (2019)
- [How to Train Your Energy-Based Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03288/) (2021)
- [Robust Test-Time Adaptation in Dynamic Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13899/) (2023)
- [NOTE: Robust Continual Test-time Adaptation Against Temporal Correlation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05117/) (2022)
- [On Pitfalls of Test-Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03536/) (2023)
- [Deep Directed Generative Models with Energy-Based Probability Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03439/) (2016)
- [Test-Time Domain Adaptation by Learning Domain-Aware Batch Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10165/) (2023)
- [JEM++: Improved Techniques for Training JEM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.09032/) (2021)
- [EGC: Image Generation and Classification via a Diffusion Energy-Based Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02012/) (2023)
- [Contrastive Divergence Learning is a Time Reversal Adversarial Game](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03295/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Test-time adaptation (TTA) enhances model robustness by enabling adaptation to target distributions that differ from training distributions, improving real-world generalizability. However, most existing TTA approaches focus on adjusting the conditional distribution and therefore exhibit poor calibration, as they rely on uncertain predictions in the absence of labels. Energy-based TTA frameworks provide an alternative by modeling the marginal distribution of target data without depending on label predictions, but their reliance on costly sampling hinders scalability in real-world scenarios where decisions must be made without latency. In this work, we propose Contrastive Residual Energy Test-time Adaptation (CreTTA), a practical solution for reliable adaptation. We theoretically reformulate the marginal distribution adaptation as learning a residual energy function. This formulation leads to a contrastive objective where the intractable partition function mathematically cancels out, removing sampling and approximation error.Crucially, our analysis reveals that this design prevents overfitting through an adaptive gradient reweighting mechanism that leverages relative energy differences, avoiding the self-confirming bias of entropy minimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CreTTA achieves scalable and well-calibrated adaptation under real-world computational constraints.