Test Time Adaptation Using Adaptive Quantile Recalibration

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Mehrbod, Paria, Vianna, Pedro, Nanfack, Geraldin, Wolf, Guy, Belilovsky, Eugene
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Mehrbod, Paria
Vianna, Pedro
Nanfack, Geraldin
Wolf, Guy
Belilovsky, Eugene
author_facet Mehrbod, Paria
Vianna, Pedro
Nanfack, Geraldin
Wolf, Guy
Belilovsky, Eugene
contents Domain adaptation is a key strategy for enhancing the generalizability of deep learning models in real-world scenarios, where test distributions often diverge significantly from the training domain. However, conventional approaches typically rely on prior knowledge of the target domain or require model retraining, limiting their practicality in dynamic or resource-constrained environments. Recent test-time adaptation methods based on batch normalization statistic updates allow for unsupervised adaptation, but they often fail to capture complex activation distributions and are constrained to specific normalization layers. We propose Adaptive Quantile Recalibration (AQR), a test-time adaptation technique that modifies pre-activation distributions by aligning quantiles on a channel-wise basis. AQR captures the full shape of activation distributions and generalizes across architectures employing BatchNorm, GroupNorm, or LayerNorm. To address the challenge of estimating distribution tails under varying batch sizes, AQR incorporates a robust tail calibration strategy that improves stability and precision. Our method leverages source-domain statistics computed at training time, enabling unsupervised adaptation without retraining models. Experiments on CIFAR-10-C, CIFAR-100-C, and ImageNet-C across multiple architectures demonstrate that AQR achieves robust adaptation across diverse settings, outperforming existing test-time adaptation baselines. These results highlight AQR's potential for deployment in real-world scenarios with dynamic and unpredictable data distributions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_03148
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Test Time Adaptation Using Adaptive Quantile Recalibration
Mehrbod, Paria
Vianna, Pedro
Nanfack, Geraldin
Wolf, Guy
Belilovsky, Eugene
Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Domain adaptation is a key strategy for enhancing the generalizability of deep learning models in real-world scenarios, where test distributions often diverge significantly from the training domain. However, conventional approaches typically rely on prior knowledge of the target domain or require model retraining, limiting their practicality in dynamic or resource-constrained environments. Recent test-time adaptation methods based on batch normalization statistic updates allow for unsupervised adaptation, but they often fail to capture complex activation distributions and are constrained to specific normalization layers. We propose Adaptive Quantile Recalibration (AQR), a test-time adaptation technique that modifies pre-activation distributions by aligning quantiles on a channel-wise basis. AQR captures the full shape of activation distributions and generalizes across architectures employing BatchNorm, GroupNorm, or LayerNorm. To address the challenge of estimating distribution tails under varying batch sizes, AQR incorporates a robust tail calibration strategy that improves stability and precision. Our method leverages source-domain statistics computed at training time, enabling unsupervised adaptation without retraining models. Experiments on CIFAR-10-C, CIFAR-100-C, and ImageNet-C across multiple architectures demonstrate that AQR achieves robust adaptation across diverse settings, outperforming existing test-time adaptation baselines. These results highlight AQR's potential for deployment in real-world scenarios with dynamic and unpredictable data distributions.
title Test Time Adaptation Using Adaptive Quantile Recalibration
topic Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.03148