Architecture-Agnostic Test-Time Adaptation via Backprop-Free Embedding Alignment

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission9055 Authors

Keywords: Test-time adaptation; efficiency; feature space; embedding alignment

TL;DR: This paper propose a lightweight forward-only test-time adaptation approach using covariance alignment in embedding space.

Abstract:

Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) adapts a deployed model during online inference to mitigate the impact of domain shift. While achieving strong accuracy, most existing methods rely on backpropagation, which is memory and computation intensive, making them unsuitable for resource-constrained devices. Recent attempts to reduce this overhead often suffer from high latency or are tied to specific architectures such as ViT-only or CNN-only.
In this work, we revisit domain shift from an embedding perspective. Our analysis reveals that domain shift induces three distinct structural changes in the embedding space: translation (mean shift), scaling (variance shift), and rotation (covariance shift). Based on this insight, we propose Progressive Embedding Alignment (PEA), a backpropagation-free and architecture-agnostic TTA approach. By applying a novel covariance alignment procedure at each intermediate layer, PEA efficiently corrects the embedding distortions with only two forward passes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PEA achieves state-of-the-art performance in both accuracy and efficiency, while also proving versatile across different architectures including ViTs and CNNs.

Primary Area: transfer learning, meta learning, and lifelong learning

Submission Number: 9055