Mitigating the ID-OOD Tradeoff in Open-Set Test-Time Adaptation

arXiv cs.CV / 4/3/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper studies open-set test-time adaptation (OSTTA), where covariate-shifted in-distribution (csID) samples and covariate-shifted out-of-distribution (csOOD) samples occur together during inference.
  • It explains the core limitation of combining entropy minimization (to preserve ID accuracy under shift) with entropy maximization (to improve OOD detection), highlighting an unavoidable trade-off between csID classification and csOOD rejection.
  • The authors propose ROSETTA, using an angular loss to regulate feature norm magnitudes and a feature-norm loss to suppress csOOD logits, aiming to reduce that conflict.
  • Experiments show strong OOD detection while maintaining high ID performance across multiple corrupted/shift benchmarks (CIFAR-10-C, CIFAR-100-C, Tiny-ImageNet-C, ImageNet-C), with additional validation on Cityscapes (semantic segmentation) and HAC (different OSTTA setups).

Abstract

Open-set test-time adaptation (OSTTA) addresses the challenge of adapting models to new environments where out-of-distribution (OOD) samples coexist with in-distribution (ID) samples affected by distribution shifts. In such settings, covariate shift-for example, changes in weather conditions such as snow-can alter ID samples, reducing model reliability. Consequently, models must not only correctly classify covariate-shifted ID (csID) samples but also effectively reject covariate-shifted OOD (csOOD) samples. Entropy minimization is a common strategy in test-time adaptation to maintain ID performance under distribution shifts, while entropy maximization is widely applied to enhance OOD detection. Several studies have sought to combine these objectives to tackle the challenges of OSTTA. However, the intrinsic conflict between entropy minimization and maximization inevitably leads to a trade-off between csID classification and csOOD detection. In this paper, we first analyze the limitations of entropy maximization in OSTTA and then introduce an angular loss to regulate feature norm magnitudes, along with a feature-norm loss to suppress csOOD logits, thereby improving OOD detection. These objectives form ROSETTA, a \underline{r}obust \underline{o}pen-\underline{se}t \underline{t}est-\underline{t}ime \underline{a}daptation. Our method achieves strong OOD detection while maintaining high ID classification performance on CIFAR-10-C, CIFAR-100-C, Tiny-ImageNet-C and ImageNet-C. Furthermore, experiments on the Cityscapes validate the method's effectiveness in real-world semantic segmentation, and results on the HAC dataset demonstrate its applicability across different open-set TTA setups.