# POEM: Explore Unexplored Reliable Samples to Enhance Test-Time Adaptation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03258 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03258/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Advances and Open Problems in Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04977/) (2019)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [Knowledge Distillation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05525/) (2020)
- [Natural Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07174/) (2019)
- [Learning Transferable Features with Deep Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02791/) (2015)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02685/) (2019)
- [Learning Robust Global Representations by Penalizing Local Predictive Power](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13549/) (2019)
- [Generalizing to Unseen Domains: A Survey on Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03097/) (2021)
- [Domain Generalization: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02503/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Contrastive Test-Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10377/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Self-supervised Learning: Algorithms, Applications, and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05712/) (2023)
- [Robust Test-Time Adaptation in Dynamic Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13899/) (2023)
- [Understanding The Robustness in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12451/) (2022)
- [Open Domain Generalization with Domain-Augmented Meta-Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03620/) (2021)
- [Entropy is not Enough for Test-Time Adaptation: From the Perspective of Disentangled Factors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07366/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Source-free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11803/) (2023)
- [Decorate the Newcomers: Visual Domain Prompt for Continual Test Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04145/) (2022)
- [Test-Time Model Adaptation with Only Forward Passes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01650/) (2024)
- [Test-Time Adaptation to Distribution Shift by Confidence Maximization and Input Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14999/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Test-time adaptation (TTA) aims to transfer knowledge from a source model to unknown test data with potential distribution shifts in an online manner. Many existing TTA methods rely on entropy as a confidence metric to optimize the model. However, these approaches are sensitive to the predefined entropy threshold, influencing which samples are chosen for model adaptation. Consequently, potentially reliable target samples are often overlooked and underutilized. For instance, a sample's entropy might slightly exceed the threshold initially, but fall below it after the model is updated. Such samples can provide stable supervised information and offer a normal range of gradients to guide model adaptation. In this paper, we propose a general approach, underlinePOEM, to promote TTA via exunderlineploring the previously unexplunderlineored reliablunderlinee saunderlinemples. Additionally, we introduce an extra Adapt Branch network to strike a balance between extracting domain-agnostic representations and achieving high performance on target data. Comprehensive experiments across multiple architectures demonstrate that POEM consistently outperforms existing TTA methods in both challenging scenarios and real-world domain shifts, while remaining computationally efficient. The effectiveness of POEM is evaluated through extensive analyses and thorough ablation studies. Moreover, the core idea behind POEM can be employed as an augmentation strategy to boost the performance of existing TTA approaches. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/ycarobot/POEM