InsCal: Calibrated Multi-Source Fully Test-Time Prompt Tuning for Object Detection

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission15066 Authors

Keywords: Source-free zero-shot learning, model calibration

Abstract: Test-time prompt tuning (TPT) has emerged as a powerful technique for adapting pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) to diverse downstream tasks, including image classification and visual reasoning. With the rise of text-driven object detectors, we extend TPT to object detection, unlocking new capabilities for cross-domain adaptation. However, a critical challenge in TPT is the inherent miscalibration caused by entropy minimization: domain shifts often lead to incorrect predictions, and enforcing high confidence exacerbates miscalibration, ultimately degrading performance. To tackle this, we introduce InsCal, a novel framework designed to enhance cross-domain object detection through three key innovations: (1) extending TPT to a multi-source paradigm, enabling knowledge aggregation across diverse domains; (2) reducing domain gaps via a novel text-driven style transfer strategy that aligns features to the source domain without requiring reference images; and (3) refining the entropy minimization objective with instance-specific calibration, ensuring robust and well-calibrated adaptation. Our approach not only mitigates miscalibration but also significantly improves cross-domain object detection performance, setting a new benchmark for test-time adaptation in VLMs.

Primary Area: applications to computer vision, audio, language, and other modalities

Submission Number: 15066