Test-Time Adaptation in Point Clouds: Leveraging Sampling Variation with Weight Averaging

Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) addresses distribution shifts during testing by adapting a pretrained model without access to source data. In this work we propose a novel TTA approach for 3D point cloud classification combining sampling variation with weight averaging. Our method leverages Farthest Point Sampling (FPS) and K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) to create multiple point cloud representations adapting the model for each variation using the TENT algorithm. The final model parameters are obtained by averaging the adapted weights leading to improved robustness against distribution shifts. Extensive experiments on ModelNet40-C ShapeNet-C and ScanObjectNN-C datasets with different backbones (Point-MAE PointNet DGCNN) demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing methods while maintaining minimal resource overhead. The proposed method effectively enhances model generalization and stability in challenging real-world conditions. The implementation is available at: https://github.com/AliBahri94/SVWA_TTA.git.