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Poster
Test Time Adaptation via Conjugate Pseudo-labels
Sachin Goyal · Mingjie Sun · Aditi Raghunathan · J. Zico Kolter

Wed Nov 30 09:00 AM -- 11:00 AM (PST) @ Hall J #803
Test-time adaptation (TTA) refers to adapting neural networks to distribution shifts, specifically with just access to unlabeled test samples from the new domain at test-time. Prior TTA methods optimize over unsupervised objectives such as the entropy of model predictions in TENT (Wang et al., 2021), but it is unclear what exactly makes a good TTA loss. In this paper, we start by presenting a surprising phenomenon: if we attempt to $\textit{meta-learn}$ the best'' possible TTA loss over a wide class of functions, then we recover a function that is $\textit{remarkably}$ similar to (a temperature-scaled version of) the softmax-entropy employed by TENT. This only holds, however, if the classifier we are adapting is trained via cross-entropy loss; if the classifier is trained via squared loss, a different best'' TTA loss emerges.To explain this phenomenon, we analyze test-time adaptation through the lens of the training losses's $\textit{convex conjugate}$. We show that under natural conditions, this (unsupervised) conjugate function can be viewed as a good local approximation to the original supervised loss and indeed, it recovers the best'' losses found by meta-learning. This leads to a generic recipe than be used to find a good TTA loss for $\textit{any}$ given supervised training loss function of a general class. Empirically, our approach dominates other TTA alternatives over a wide range of domain adaptation benchmarks. Our approach is particularly of interest when applied to classifiers trained with $\textit{novel}$ loss functions, e.g., the recently-proposed PolyLoss (Leng et al., 2022) function, where it differs substantially from (and outperforms) an entropy-based loss. Further, we show that our conjugate based approach can also be interpreted as a kind of self-training using a very specific soft label, which we refer to as the $\textit{conjugate pseudo-label}$. Overall, therefore, our method provides a broad framework for better understanding and improving test-time adaptation. Code is available at https://github.com/locuslab/tta_conjugate.

#### Author Information

##### J. Zico Kolter (Carnegie Mellon University / Bosch Center for AI)

Zico Kolter is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and also serves as Chief Scientist of AI Research for the Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence. His work focuses on the intersection of machine learning and optimization, with a large focus on developing more robust, explainable, and rigorous methods in deep learning. In addition, he has worked on a number of application areas, highlighted by work on sustainability and smart energy systems. He is the recipient of the DARPA Young Faculty Award, and best paper awards at KDD, IJCAI, and PESGM.