LATTA: Langevin-Anchored Test-Time Adaptation for Enhanced Robustness and Stability

Abstract: Test-time adaptation (TTA) aims to adapt a pretrained model to distribution shifts using only unlabeled test data. While promising, existing methods like Tent suffer from instability and can catastrophically forget the source knowledge, especially with small batch sizes or challenging corruptions. We argue that this arises from overly deterministic updates on a complex loss surface. In this paper, we introduce Langevin-Anchored Test-Time Adaptation (LATTA), a novel approach that regularizes adaptation through two key mechanisms: (1) a noisy weight perturbation inspired by Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) to explore the local parameter space and escape poor local minima, and (2) a stable weight anchor that prevents the model from diverging from its robust source pre-training. This combination allows LATTA to adapt effectively without sacrificing stability. Unlike prior Bayesian TTA methods, LATTA requires no architectural changes or expensive Monte Carlo passes. We conduct extensive experiments on standard benchmarks, including Rotated-MNIST and the more challenging CIFAR-10-C. Our results demonstrate that LATTA significantly outperforms existing methods, including Tent, CoTTA, and EATA, setting a new state of the art for self-supervised TTA by improving average accuracy on CIFAR-10-C by over 2% while simultaneously reducing performance variance.