GDA: Generalized Diffusion for Robust Test-time Adaptation
Authors: Yun-Yun Tsai, Fu-Chen Chen, Albert Y. C. Chen, Junfeng Yang, Che-Chun Su, Min Sun, Cheng-Hao Kuo

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. based adaptation. 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.