ZeroSiam: An Efficient Asymmetry for Test-Time Entropy Optimization without Collapse

Guohao Chen, Shuaicheng Niu, Deyu Chen, Jiahao Yang, Zitian Zhang, Mingkui Tan, Pengcheng Wu, Zhiqi Shen

Abstract: Test-time entropy minimization can favor non-generalizable shortcuts, such as inflating the logit norm and driving all predictions to a dominant class to reduce entropy, risking collapsed solutions (e.g., constant one-hot outputs) that trivially minimize the objective without meaningful learning. In this paper, we reveal asymmetry as a key mechanism for collapse prevention and introduce ZeroSiam--an efficient asymmetric Siamese architecture tailored for test-time entropy minimization. ZeroSiam efficiently achieves asymmetry with a learnable predictor and a stop-gradient operator before the classifier. We provide empirical and theoretical evidence that ZeroSiam not only prevents collapse, but also regularizes biased learning signals, enhancing performance even when no collapse occurs. Despite its simplicity, extensive results show that ZeroSiam performs more stably over prior methods using negligible overhead, demonstrating efficacy on both vision adaptation and large language model reasoning tasks across challenging test scenarios and diverse models, including the particularly collapse-prone tiny models.

Submission Number: 53