The Batch Size Can Be One: Test-Time Adaptation from Classifier Geometry

Summary

Test-time adaptation updates a deployed model on an unlabeled test stream. In practice this stream often arrives one sample at a time, with the classes in no particular order. A single sample then provides limited information for estimating distribution-level statistics, and selecting samples by confidence can admit predictions that are wrong yet confident. A corruption, however, shifts the features while leaving the decision regions of the frozen classifier unchanged. We therefore propose Origin-recentered Test-Time Adaptation (OriTTA), which constructs fixed geometric targets from the source model and adapts selected features toward them. Seen from the origin of the feature space, the classes lean toward a common direction. We choose a new origin to bring class scores closer together while keeping it near the mean feature of one synthetic prototype per class. From this origin, prototype directions spread more evenly, and each class obtains an axis and an ideal point before any test data arrives. During adaptation, OriTTA aligns selected features with their predicted class axis and penalizes excessive radius, keeps one input per predicted class in memory to limit feature changes for classes absent from the stream, and resets the model when re-classifying this memory reveals collapse. Without tuning for each setting, OriTTA achieves the highest mean accuracy at batch size 1 on CIFAR-10-C, CIFAR-100-C and ImageNet-C in all sixteen combinations of four backbones, two protocols and two stream orders. On ImageNet-C fog, recent methods collapse in up to two thirds of one hundred runs, while OriTTA never does.