Test-Time Adaptation on Noisy Data via Model-Pruning-Based Filtering and Flatness-Aware Entropy Minimization

Abstract Test-time adaptation (TTA) deals with domain shifts during inference by training models based on only unlabeled test samples. Test samples may include noisy samples, which degrade domain adaptation. Existing methods rely on the model's output prediction to detect and filter noisy samples, and further search for flat regions during optimization, which makes the optimization more robust on noisy samples. However, there are two issues: (1) the output prediction tends to be inaccurate due to domain shifts, weakening noisy-sample detection; (2) current approaches for searching flat regions focus on optimization to enhance the worst case, which ignores achieving flatness by avoiding the quick changing of losses. To address these challenges, we propose a model pruning-based test-time adaptation model for noisy data streams, named MoTTA, which leverages a new proposed filtering, output difference under pruning (ODP)-based filtering, and a flatness-aware entropy minimization (FlatEM). Specifically, to reduce the impact of inaccurate output predictions, ODP-based filtering measures the output difference of a sample before and after model pruning, which works even under inaccurate output. To improve the search for flat loss surfaces, FlatEM integrates zeroth-order flatness and first-order flatness (minimize the maximal gradient normalization with a weight perturbation constrained in a small Euclidean ball) on entropy minimization. To solve these hard maximum problems, we leverage Taylor expansion to obtain approximated results for optimization. FlatEM also adopts a parameter regularization to mitigate incorrect updates from noisy samples. The experiments show our advantages in dealing with noisy data streams at TTA comparable to existing baselines.