Progressive Conditioned Scale-Shift Recalibration of Self-Attention for Online Test-time Adaptation

Abstract: Online test-time adaptation aims to dynamically adjust a network model in real-time based on sequential input samples during the inference stage. In this work, we find that, when applying a transformer network model to a new target domain, the Query, Key, and Value features of its self-attention module often change significantly from those in the source domain, leading to substantial performance degradation of the transformer model. To address this important issue, we propose to develop a new approach to progressively recalibrate the self-attention at each layer using a local linear transform parameterized by conditioned scale and shift factors. We consider the online model adaptation from the source domain to the target domain as a progressive domain shift separation process. At each transformer network layer, we learn a Domain Separation Network to extract the domain shift feature, which is used to predict the scale and shift parameters for self-attention recalibration using a Factor Generator Network. These two lightweight networks are adapted online during inference. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed progressive conditioned scale-shift recalibration (PCSR) method is able to significantly improve the online test-time domain adaptation performance by a large margin of up to 3.9\% in classification accuracy on the ImageNet-C dataset.