CD-Buffer: Complementary Dual-Buffer Framework for Test-Time Adaptation in Adverse Weather Object Detection

摘要

Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) enables real-time adaptation to domain shifts without offline retraining. Recent TTA methods have predominantly explored additive approaches that introduce lightweight modules for feature refinement. Recently, a subtractive approach that removes domain-sensitive channels has emerged as an alternative direction. We observe that these paradigms exhibit complementary effectiveness patterns: subtractive methods excel under severe shifts by removing corrupted features, while additive methods are effective under moderate shifts requiring refinement. However, each paradigm operates effectively only within limited shift severity ranges, failing to generalize across diverse corruption levels. This leads to the following question: can we adaptively balance both strategies based on measured feature-level domain shift? We propose CD-Buffer, a novel complementary dual-buffer framework where subtractive and additive mechanisms operate in opposite yet coordinated directions, driven by a unified discrepancy metric. Our key innovation lies in discrepancy-driven coupling, which unifies removal and refinement through a shared metric and automatically balances both strategies based on feature-level shift severity. This establishes channel-wise adaptive balancing that enables differentiated treatment for heterogeneous shift magnitudes without manual tuning. Extensive experiments on KITTI, Cityscapes, and ACDC datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, consistently achieving superior results across diverse weather conditions and severity levels.