Mask to Adapt: Simple Random Masking Enables Robust Continual Test-Time Learning

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08048v1
• Date: Mon, 08 Dec 2025 21:16:44 GMT
• Title: Mask to Adapt: Simple Random Masking Enables Robust Continual Test-Time Learning
• Authors: Chandler Timm C. Doloriel,
• Abstract summary: Recent continual test-time adaptation (CTTA) methods use masking to regulate learning, but often depend on calibrated uncertainty or stable attention scores.<n>We introduce Mask to Adapt (M2A), a simple CTTA approach that generates a short sequence of masked views.<n>We show that M2A attains 8.3%/19.8%/39.2% mean error, outperforming or matching strong CTTA baselines.
• Score: 1.1458853556386797
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Distribution shifts at test time degrade image classifiers. Recent continual test-time adaptation (CTTA) methods use masking to regulate learning, but often depend on calibrated uncertainty or stable attention scores and introduce added complexity. We ask: do we need custom-made masking designs, or can a simple random masking schedule suffice under strong corruption? We introduce Mask to Adapt (M2A), a simple CTTA approach that generates a short sequence of masked views (spatial or frequency) and adapts with two objectives: a mask consistency loss that aligns predictions across different views and an entropy minimization loss that encourages confident outputs. Motivated by masked image modeling, we study two common masking families -- spatial masking and frequency masking -- and further compare subtypes within each (spatial: patch vs.\ pixel; frequency: all vs.\ low vs.\ high). On CIFAR10C/CIFAR100C/ImageNetC (severity~5), M2A (Spatial) attains 8.3\%/19.8\%/39.2\% mean error, outperforming or matching strong CTTA baselines, while M2A (Frequency) lags behind. Ablations further show that simple random masking is effective and robust. These results indicate that a simple random masking schedule, coupled with consistency and entropy objectives, is sufficient to drive effective test-time adaptation without relying on uncertainty or attention signals.

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