# Progressive Conditioned Scale-Shift Recalibration of Self-Attention for Online Test-time Adaptation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.12673 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12673/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 45 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 45)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [Conditional Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05557/) (2022)
- [Natural Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07174/) (2019)
- [BitFit: Simple Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning for Transformer-based Masked Language-models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10199/) (2021)
- [Do We Really Need to Access the Source Data? Source Hypothesis Transfer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08546/) (2020)
- [AdaptFormer: Adapting Vision Transformers for Scalable Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13535/) (2022)
- [Continual Test-Time Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13591/) (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)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning with Diff Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07463/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Test-Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10377/) (2022)
- [Test-Time Training with Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07522/) (2022)
- [Adaptive Risk Minimization: Learning to Adapt to Domain Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02931/) (2020)
- [Model Adaptation: Historical Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation without Source Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03374/) (2021)
- [Efficient Test-Time Adaptation of Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18293/) (2024)
- [Source-Free Domain Adaptation via Distribution Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11257/) (2022)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning for Test-time Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04831/) (2022)
- [Cross-domain Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05528/) (2021)
- [MM-TTA: Multi-Modal Test-Time Adaptation for 3D Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12667/) (2022)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning for Generative Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00990/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Online test-time adaptation aims to dynamically adjust a network model in real-time based on sequential input samples during the inference stage. In this work, we find that, when applying a transformer network model to a new target domain, the Query, Key, and Value features of its self-attention module often change significantly from those in the source domain, leading to substantial performance degradation of the transformer model. To address this important issue, we propose to develop a new approach to progressively recalibrate the self-attention at each layer using a local linear transform parameterized by conditioned scale and shift factors. We consider the online model adaptation from the source domain to the target domain as a progressive domain shift separation process. At each transformer network layer, we learn a Domain Separation Network to extract the domain shift feature, which is used to predict the scale and shift parameters for self-attention recalibration using a Factor Generator Network. These two lightweight networks are adapted online during inference. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed progressive conditioned scale-shift recalibration (PCSR) method is able to significantly improve the online test-time domain adaptation performance by a large margin of up to 3.9% in classification accuracy on the ImageNet-C dataset.