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Paper · 2603.21928 · 2026

The Golden Subspace: Where Efficiency Meets Generalization in Continual Test-Time Adaptation

Han-Jia Ye, Zhenguo Li, Da-Wei Zhou, Guannan Lai

arXiv · PDF · Open in the Atlas

Code that ran

We lifted 13 functions out of this paper's own repositories and ran 12 of them in a sandbox. "Ran" means the function executed on a synthesized input and returned a value. It is not a reproduction of the paper's results.

RepositoryRoleRan
AIGNLAI/GOLD canonical 12 of 13
FunctionStatusWhere it lives
complete_data_dir_path Ran AIGNLAI/GOLD/classification/conf.py
pointer only (licence: NONE) · get_code("53b1e10b7cc3d6de")
create_file_list Ran AIGNLAI/GOLD/classification/datasets/imagenet_subsets.py
pointer only (licence: NONE) · get_code("0c4495cb2187be84")
ds_name2pytorch_ds_name Ran AIGNLAI/GOLD/classification/conf.py
pointer only (licence: NONE) · get_code("22a042db3ce6f8bb")
forward_decorator Ran AIGNLAI/GOLD/classification/methods/base.py
pointer only (licence: NONE) · get_code("ef670fd2920b7ce2")
get_num_classes Ran AIGNLAI/GOLD/classification/conf.py
pointer only (licence: NONE) · get_code("4d83f34a9766b4a9")
kernel Ran AIGNLAI/GOLD/classification/methods/cmf.py
pointer only (licence: NONE) · get_code("b086cfc2dfe368f4")
refine_predictions Ran AIGNLAI/GOLD/classification/methods/adacontrast.py
pointer only (licence: NONE) · get_code("6c5a8d4a69a975c2")
setup_adacontrast_optimizer Ran AIGNLAI/GOLD/classification/methods/adacontrast.py
pointer only (licence: NONE) · get_code("ba822e549de6a087")
soft_k_nearest_neighbors Ran AIGNLAI/GOLD/classification/methods/adacontrast.py
pointer only (licence: NONE) · get_code("110b394c4d611e0b")
softmax_entropy_cifar Ran AIGNLAI/GOLD/classification/methods/cotta.py
pointer only (licence: NONE) · get_code("991d0f3401682804")
softmax_entropy_imagenet Ran AIGNLAI/GOLD/classification/methods/cotta.py
pointer only (licence: NONE) · get_code("6bdfed740b3da7ce")
update_model_probs Ran AIGNLAI/GOLD/classification/methods/cmf.py
pointer only (licence: NONE) · get_code("073ab5af80ddbe36")
create_imagenet_subset Not yet run AIGNLAI/GOLD/classification/datasets/imagenet_subsets.py
pointer only (licence: NONE) · get_code("b723ea0fcdc2c948")

Repositories linked to this paper

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Abstract

Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA) aims to enable models to adapt online to unlabeled data streams under distribution shift without accessing source data. Existing CTTA methods face an efficiency-generalization trade-off: updating more parameters improves adaptation but severely reduces online inference efficiency. An ideal solution is to achieve comparable adaptation with minimal feature updates; we call this minimal subspace the golden subspace. We prove its existence in a single-step adaptation setting and show that it coincides with the row space of the pretrained classifier. To enable online maintenance of this subspace, we introduce the sample-wise Average Gradient Outer Product (AGOP) as an efficient proxy for estimating the classifier weights without retraining. Building on these insights, we propose Guided Online Low-rank Directional adaptation (GOLD), which uses a lightweight adapter to project features onto the golden subspace and learns a compact scaling vector while the subspace is dynamically updated via AGOP. Extensive experiments on classification and segmentation benchmarks, including autonomousdriving scenarios, demonstrate that GOLD attains superior efficiency, stability, and overall performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/AIGNLAI/GOLD.

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