# DOME: Learning Transferable Domain Variables from Sparse Supervision for Test-Time Adaptation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.07646 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.07646/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Sparse Autoencoders Find Highly Interpretable Features in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08600/) (2023)
- [Moment Matching for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01754/) (2018)
- [Instance Normalization: The Missing Ingredient for Fast Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08022/) (2016)
- [Learning Robust Global Representations by Penalizing Local Predictive Power](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13549/) (2019)
- [Deeper, Broader and Artier Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03077/) (2017)
- [Domain Generalization with MixStyle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02008/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Semantic Foggy Scene Understanding with Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07819/) (2017)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Test-Time Adaptation under Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15361/) (2023)
- [k-Sparse Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.5663/) (2013)
- [Neural Style Transfer: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.04058/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Domain Generalization via Conditional Invariant Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.08479/) (2018)
- [Entropy is not Enough for Test-Time Adaptation: From the Perspective of Disentangled Factors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07366/) (2024)
- [A Free Lunch for Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Object Detection without Source Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05400/) (2020)
- [Batch-Instance Normalization for Adaptively Style-Invariant Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07925/) (2018)
- [Test-Time Model Adaptation with Only Forward Passes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01650/) (2024)
- [Beyond Model Adaptation at Test Time: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03687/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Test-time adaptation (TTA) aims to align a model to shifting test domains using only unlabeled streaming data. Most existing methods implicitly infer a single global domain distribution, ignoring the multidimensional and sample-specific nature of real-world domain shifts, leading to fragile adaptation. We propose DOME, an effective domain encoder that explicitly models each sample's domain in a zero-shot manner. DOME leverages vision-language pretraining to extract dense, continuous representations, parameterizes domains as distributional variables, and introduces a momentum-updated sparse domain bank for disentangled supervision. By injecting these explicit domain cues into downstream models, even a basic entropy-minimization TTA strategy achieves state-of-the-art performance across ImageNet-C, ImageNet-R, and ImageNet-Sketch, outperforming complex TTA approaches. Our results demonstrate that robust adaptation stems not from intricate adaptation algorithms, but from explicit, structured domain representation.