# ETA: Energy-based Test-time Adaptation for Depth Completion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05989 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05989/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 126 of its 167 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 126)

- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [nuScenes: A multimodal dataset for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.11027/) (2019)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Scalability in Perception for Autonomous Driving: Waymo Open Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04838/) (2019)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [Moment Matching for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01754/) (2018)
- [VoxelNet: End-to-End Learning for Point Cloud Based 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06396/) (2017)
- [DeepFool: a simple and accurate method to fool deep neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04599/) (2015)
- [Depth Map Prediction from a Single Image using a Multi-Scale Deep Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2283/) (2014)
- [PWC-Net: CNNs for Optical Flow Using Pyramid, Warping, and Cost Volume](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.02371/) (2017)
- [Adversarial Examples Are Not Bugs, They Are Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02175/) (2019)
- [Adversarial Machine Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01236/) (2016)
- [Ensemble Adversarial Training: Attacks and Defenses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07204/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation with Left-Right Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.03677/) (2016)
- [Pixel Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.06759/) (2016)
- [Universal adversarial perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.08401/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Depth and Ego-Motion from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07813/) (2017)
- [Deep Neural Networks are Easily Fooled: High Confidence Predictions for Unrecognizable Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.1897/) (2014)
- [Improving Transferability of Adversarial Examples with Input Diversity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06978/) (2018)
- [Continual Test-Time Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13591/) (2022)
- [Countering Adversarial Images using Input Transformations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00117/) (2017)
- [Efficient Test-Time Model Adaptation without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02610/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Depth Completion as Parameter-Efficient Test-Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.14751/) (2026)
- [VisTa3D: A Dataset and Benchmark for Thin Object Reconstruction from Vision, Tactile, and 3D Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20740/) (2026)
- [The JEPA Predictor: A Transferable Operator for Occluded Feature Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.16274/) (2026)
- [From Perspective to Fisheye Depth Estimation and Open-Vocabulary Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.27860/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a method for test-time adaptation of pretrained depth completion models. Depth completion models, trained on some ``source'' data, often predict erroneous outputs when transferred to ``target'' data captured in novel environmental conditions due to a covariate shift. The crux of our method lies in quantifying the likelihood of depth predictions belonging to the source data distribution. The challenge is in the lack of access to out-of-distribution (target) data prior to deployment. Hence, rather than making assumptions regarding the target distribution, we utilize adversarial perturbations as a mechanism to explore the data space. This enables us to train an energy model that scores local regions of depth predictions as in- or out-of-distribution. We update the parameters of pretrained depth completion models at test time to minimize energy, effectively aligning test-time predictions to those of the source distribution. We call our method ``Energy-based Test-time Adaptation'', or ETA for short. We evaluate our method across three indoor and three outdoor datasets, where ETA improve over the previous state-of-the-art method by an average of 6.94% for outdoors and 10.23% for indoors. Project Page: https://fuzzythecat.github.io/eta.