DM-POSA: Enhancing Open-World Test-Time Adaptation with Dual-Mode Matching and Prompt-Based Open Set Adaptation

Abstract

The need to generalize the pre-trained deep learning models to unknown test-time data distributions has spurred research into test-time adaptation (TTA). Existing studies have mainly focused on closed-set TTA with only covariate shifts, while largely overlooking open-set TTA that involves semantic shifts, i.e., unknown open-set classes. However, addressing adaptation to unknown classes is crucial for open-world safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving. In this paper, we emphasize that accurate identification of the open-set samples is rather challenging in TTA. The entanglement of semantic shift and covariate shift mutually confuse the network’s discriminative capability. This co-interference further exacerbates considering the single-pass data nature and low latency requirements. With this under standing, we propose Dual-mode Matching and Prompt-based Open Set Adaptation (DM-POSA) for open-set TTA to enhance discriminative feature learning and unknown classes distinguishment with minimal time cost. DM-POSA identifies open-set samples via dual-mode matching strategies, including model-parameter-based and feature space-based matching. It also optimizes the model with a random pairing discrepancy loss, enhancing the distributional difference between open-set and closed-set samples, thus improving the model’s ability to recognize unknown categories. Extensive experiments show the superiority of DM-POSA over state-of-the-art baselines on both closed-set class adaptation and open-set class detection.