When Small Guides Large: Cross-Model Co-Learning for Test-Time Adaptation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Yi, Chang'an, Deng, Xiaohui, Chen, Guohao, Zhou, Yan, Lu, Qinghua, Niu, Shuaicheng
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Yi, Chang'an
Deng, Xiaohui
Chen, Guohao
Zhou, Yan
Lu, Qinghua
Niu, Shuaicheng
author_facet Yi, Chang'an
Deng, Xiaohui
Chen, Guohao
Zhou, Yan
Lu, Qinghua
Niu, Shuaicheng
contents Test-time Adaptation (TTA) adapts a given model to testing domain data with potential domain shifts through online unsupervised learning, yielding impressive performance. However, to date, existing TTA methods primarily focus on single-model adaptation. In this work, we investigate an intriguing question: how does cross-model knowledge influence the TTA process? Our findings reveal that, in TTA's unsupervised online setting, each model can provide complementary, confident knowledge to the others, even when there are substantial differences in model size. For instance, a smaller model like MobileViT (10.6M parameters) can effectively guide a larger model like ViT-Base (86.6M parameters). In light of this, we propose COCA, a Cross-Model Co-Learning framework for TTA, which mainly consists of two main strategies. 1) Co-adaptation adaptively integrates complementary knowledge from other models throughout the TTA process, reducing individual model biases. 2) Self-adaptation enhances each model's unique strengths via unsupervised learning, enabling diverse adaptation to the target domain. Extensive experiments show that COCA, which can also serve as a plug-and-play module, significantly boosts existing SOTAs, on models with various sizes--including ResNets, ViTs, and Mobile-ViTs--via cross-model co-learned TTA. For example, with Mobile-ViT's guidance, COCA raises ViT-Base's average adaptation accuracy on ImageNet-C from 51.7% to 64.5%. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/ycarobot/COCA.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_23724
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle When Small Guides Large: Cross-Model Co-Learning for Test-Time Adaptation
Yi, Chang'an
Deng, Xiaohui
Chen, Guohao
Zhou, Yan
Lu, Qinghua
Niu, Shuaicheng
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Test-time Adaptation (TTA) adapts a given model to testing domain data with potential domain shifts through online unsupervised learning, yielding impressive performance. However, to date, existing TTA methods primarily focus on single-model adaptation. In this work, we investigate an intriguing question: how does cross-model knowledge influence the TTA process? Our findings reveal that, in TTA's unsupervised online setting, each model can provide complementary, confident knowledge to the others, even when there are substantial differences in model size. For instance, a smaller model like MobileViT (10.6M parameters) can effectively guide a larger model like ViT-Base (86.6M parameters). In light of this, we propose COCA, a Cross-Model Co-Learning framework for TTA, which mainly consists of two main strategies. 1) Co-adaptation adaptively integrates complementary knowledge from other models throughout the TTA process, reducing individual model biases. 2) Self-adaptation enhances each model's unique strengths via unsupervised learning, enabling diverse adaptation to the target domain. Extensive experiments show that COCA, which can also serve as a plug-and-play module, significantly boosts existing SOTAs, on models with various sizes--including ResNets, ViTs, and Mobile-ViTs--via cross-model co-learned TTA. For example, with Mobile-ViT's guidance, COCA raises ViT-Base's average adaptation accuracy on ImageNet-C from 51.7% to 64.5%. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/ycarobot/COCA.
title When Small Guides Large: Cross-Model Co-Learning for Test-Time Adaptation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23724