Learning Less Generalizable Patterns for Better Test-Time Adaptation

International audienceDeep neural networks often fail to generalize outside of their training distribution, particularly when only a single data domain is available during training. While test-time adaptation has yielded encouraging results in this setting, we argue that to reach further improvements, these approaches should be combined with training procedure modifications aiming to learn a more diverse set of patterns. Indeed, test-time adaptation methods usually have to rely on a limited representation because of the shortcut learning phenomenon: only a subset of the available predictive patterns is learned with standard training. In this paper, we first show that the combined use of existing training-time strategies and test-time batch normalization, a simple adaptation method, does not always improve upon the test-time adaptation alone on the PACS benchmark. Furthermore, experiments on Office-Home show that very few training-time methods improve upon standard training, with or without test-time batch normalization. Therefore, we propose a novel approach that mitigates the shortcut learning behavior by having an additional classification branch learn less predictive and generalizable patterns. Our experiments show that our method improves upon the state-of-the-art results on both benchmarks and benefits the most to test-time batch normalization