REALM: Robust Entropy Adaptive Loss Minimization for Improved
  Single-Sample Test-Time Adaptation
Skyler Seto Barry-John Theobald Federico Danieli Navdeep Jaitly Dan Busbridge
Fully-test-time adaptation (F-TTA) can mitigate performance loss due to
distribution shifts between train and test data (1) without access to the
training data, and (2) without knowledge of the model training procedure. In
online F-TTA, a pre-trained model is adapted using a stream of test samples by
minimizing a self-supervised objective, such as entropy minimization. However,
models adapted with online using entropy minimization, are unstable especially
in single sample settings, leading to degenerate solutions, and limiting the
adoption of TTA inference strategies. Prior works identify noisy, or
unreliable, samples as a cause of failure in online F-TTA. One solution is to
ignore these samples, which can lead to bias in the update procedure, slow
adaptation, and poor generalization. In this work, we present a general
framework for improving robustness of F-TTA to these noisy samples, inspired by
self-paced learning and robust loss functions. Our proposed approach, Robust
Entropy Adaptive Loss Minimization (REALM), achieves better adaptation accuracy
than previous approaches throughout the adaptation process on corruptions of
CIFAR-10 and ImageNet-1K, demonstrating its effectiveness.