Continual-MAE: Adaptive Distribution Masked Autoencoders for Continual Test-Time Adaptation
Authors: Jiaming Liu, Ran Xu, Senqiao Yang, Renrui Zhang, Qizhe Zhang, Zehui Chen, Yandong Guo, Shanghang Zhang

Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA) is proposed to migrate a source pre-trained model to continually changing target distributions addressing real-world dynamism. Existing CTTA methods mainly rely on entropy minimization or teacher-student pseudo-labeling schemes for knowledge extraction in unlabeled target domains. However dynamic data distributions cause miscalibrated predictions and noisy pseudo-labels in existing self-supervised learning methods hindering the effective mitigation of error accumulation and catastrophic forgetting problems during the continual adaptation process. To tackle these issues we propose a continual self-supervised method Adaptive Distribution Masked Autoencoders (ADMA) which enhances the extraction of target domain knowledge while mitigating the accumulation of distribution shifts. Specifically we propose a Distribution-aware Masking (DaM) mechanism to adaptively sample masked positions followed by establishing consistency constraints between the masked target samples and the original target samples. Additionally for masked tokens we utilize an efficient decoder to reconstruct a hand-crafted feature descriptor (e.g. Histograms of Oriented Gradients) leveraging its invariant properties to boost task-relevant representations. Through conducting extensive experiments on four widely recognized benchmarks our proposed method attains state-of-the-art performance in both classification and segmentation CTTA tasks.