STAF: Pushing the Boundaries of Test-Time Adaptation towards Practical Noise Scenarios

Haoyu Xiong, Xinchun Zhang, Leixin Yang, Yu Xiang, Gang Fang


Abstract
Test-time adaptation (TTA) aims to adapt the neural network to the distribution of the target domain using only unlabeled test data. Most previous TTA methods have achieved success under mild conditions, such as considering only a single or multiple independent static domains. However, in real-world settings, the test data is sampled in a correlated manner and the test environments undergo continual changes over time, which may cause previous TTA methods to fail in practical noise scenarios, i.e., independent noise distribution shifts, continual noise distribution shifts, and continual mixed distribution shifts. To address these issues, we elaborate a Stable Test-time Adaptation Framework, called STAF, to stabilize the adaptation process. Specifically, to boost model robustness to noise distribution shifts, we present a multi-stream perturbation consistency method, enabling weak-to-strong views to be consistent, guided by the weak view from the original sample. Meanwhile, we develop a reliable memory-based corrector which utilizes reliable snapshots between the anchor model and the adapt model to correct prediction bias. Furthermore, we propose a dynamic parameter restoration strategy to alleviate error accumulation and catastrophic forgetting that takes into account both the distribution shift and sample adaptation degree. Extensive experiments demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of STAF, which pushes the boundaries of test-time adaptation to more realistic scenarios and paves the way for stable deployment of real-world applications.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.1324
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
15226–15237
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1324
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Haoyu Xiong, Xinchun Zhang, Leixin Yang, Yu Xiang, and Gang Fang. 2024. STAF: Pushing the Boundaries of Test-Time Adaptation towards Practical Noise Scenarios. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 15226–15237, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
STAF: Pushing the Boundaries of Test-Time Adaptation towards Practical Noise Scenarios (Xiong et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/2024.lrec-main.1324.pdf
Optional supplementary material:
 2024.lrec-main.1324.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.txt