DOME: Learning Transferable Domain Variables from Sparse Supervision for Test-Time Adaptation
This work addresses the limitations of existing test-time adaptation (TTA) methods, which typically assume a single global domain distribution and overlook sample-level, multi-dimensional domain shifts, leading to fragile adaptation. To overcome this, the authors propose DOME, a novel framework that, for the first time, explicitly models continuous sample-level domain variables in a zero-shot manner. DOME leverages vision-language pretraining to extract dense domain representations and employs a momentum-updated sparse domain bank to provide decoupled supervision, subsequently injecting explicit domain information into the downstream model. By moving beyond implicit global domain assumptions, DOME enables structured domain representation. It achieves state-of-the-art performance on ImageNet-C, ImageNet-R, and ImageNet-Sketch, significantly outperforming existing TTA approaches—including more complex ones—and demonstrates the efficacy and robustness of explicit domain modeling.