Research Article 2026-04-21 posted v1

Towards Robust Federated Test-Time Adaptation: Dynamic Client Collaboration and Category-Aware Uncertainty

Y
Yongcai Li Foshan University
Y
Yuexia Zhou Foshan University
X
Xiangyu Liu Foshan University
K
Kai Chen Guangzhou University
J
Jinpeng Chen Foshan University
C
Chang'an Yi Foshan University

Abstract

Federated test-time adaptation (FTTA) enables privacy-preserving model adaptation to unlabeled target data during inference, yet it struggles with dynamic source client availability and uncertain test samples under distribution shifts. Existing methods overlook offline client impacts and rely on noisy pseudo-labels, leading to error accumulation. To address these challenges, we propose a novel FTTA framework, termed \underline{Fed}erated test-time adaptation under \underline{D}ynamic client collaboration and \underline{C}ategory-aware uncertainty (FedDC), which integrates dynamic client weighting initialization and class-aware margin thresholds to improve adaptation robustness. During source training, clients are aggregated adaptively based on participation history to reduce bias. At test time, category-specific thresholds separate confident and uncertain samples, preserving prediction uncertainty to mitigate noise. Extensive experiments on CIFAR100, Tiny-ImageNet, PACS, and CarlaTTA show that FedDC outperforms baseline methods under various distribution shifts, with clear improvements in adaptation accuracy and stability. The proposed design supports robust deployment in real-world decentralized visual systems. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/ycarobot/FedDC.

Citation Information

@article{yongcaili2026,
  title={Towards Robust Federated Test-Time Adaptation: Dynamic Client Collaboration and Category-Aware Uncertainty},
  author={Yongcai Li and Yuexia Zhou and Xiangyu Liu and Kai Chen and Jinpeng Chen and Chang'an Yi},
  journal={Research Square},
  year={2026},
  doi={https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-9453712/v1}
}
Back to Top
Home
Paper List
Submit
0.019296s