GDA: Generalized diffusion for robust test-time adaptation

Machine learning models face generalization challenges when exposed to out-of-distribution (OOD) samples with unforeseen distribution shifts. Recent research reveals that for vision tasks, test-time adaptation employing diffusion models can achieve state-of-the-art accuracy improvements on OOD samples by generating domain-aligned samples without altering the model’s weights. Unfortunately, those studies have primarily focused on pixel-level corruptions, thereby lacking the generalization to adapt to a broader range of OOD types. We introduce Generalized Diffusion Adaptation (GDA), a novel diffusion-based test-time adaptation method robust against diverse OOD types. Specifically, GDA iteratively guides the diffusion by applying a marginal entropy loss derived from the model, in conjunction with style and content preservation losses during the reverse sampling process. In other words, GDA considers the model’s output behavior and the samples’ semantic information as a whole, reducing ambiguity in downstream tasks. Evaluation across various model architectures and OOD benchmarks indicates that GDA consistently surpasses previous diffusion-based adaptation methods. Notably, it achieves the highest classification accuracy improvements, ranging from 4.4% to 5.02% on ImageNet-C and 2.5% to 7.4% on Rendition, Sketch, and Stylized benchmarks. This performance highlights GDA’s generalization to a broader range of OOD benchmarks.