Uncertainty-aware Test-Time Training (UT$^3$) for Efficient On-the-fly Domain Adaptive Dense Regression

Abstract

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are increasingly being used in autonomous systems. However, DNNs do not generalize well to domain shift. Adapting to a continuously evolving environment is a safety-critical challenge inevitably faced by all autonomous systems deployed to the real world. Recent work on test-time training proposes methods that adapt to a new test distribution on the fly by optimizing the DNN model for each test input using self-supervision. However, these techniques result in a sharp increase in inference time as multiple forward and backward passes are required for a single test sample (for test-time training) before finally making the prediction based on the fine-tuned features. This is undesirable for real-world robotics applications where these models may be deployed to resource constraint hardware with strong latency requirements. In this work, we propose a new framework (called UT$^3$) that leverages test-time training for improved performance in the presence of continuous domain shift while also decreasing the inference time, making it suitable for real-world applications. Our method proposes an uncertainty-aware self-supervision task for efficient test-time training that leverages the quantified uncertainty to selectively apply the training leading to sharp improvements in the inference time while performing comparably to standard test-time training protocol. Our proposed protocol offers a continuous setting to identify the selected keyframes, allowing the end-user to control how often to apply test-time training. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method on a dense regression task - monocular depth estimation.