CTTA-T: Continual Test-Time Adaptation for Text Understanding via Teacher-Student with a Domain-aware and Generalized Teacher
Tianlun Liu National University of Defense Technology, Zhiliang Tian National University of Defense Technology, Zhen Huang National University of Defense Technology, Xingzhi Zhou Huawei Technologies Ltd., Wanlong Yu, Tianle Liu, Feng Liu National University of Defense Technology, Dongsheng Li National University of Defense Technology
Text understanding application often suffers from domain shifts. To handle testing domains, domain adaptation (DA) is trained to adapt to a fixed and observed testing domain; a more challenging paradigm, test-time adaptation (TTA), cannot access the testing domain during training and online adapts to the testing samples during testing, where the samples are from a fixed domain. We aim to explore a more practical and underexplored scenario, continual test-time adaptation (CTTA) for text understanding, which involves a sequence of testing (unobserved) domains in testing. Current CTTA methods struggle in reducing error accumulation over domains and enhancing generalization to handle unobserved domains: 1) Noise-filtering reduces accumulated errors but discards useful information, and 2) accumulating historical domains enhances generalization, but it is hard to achieve adaptive accumulation. In this paper, we propose a CTTA-T (continual test-time adaptation for text understanding) framework adaptable to evolving target domains: CTTA-T adopts a teacher-student framework, where the teacher is equipped with domain awareness and generalization for evolving domains. To improve teacher predictions, we propose a refine-then-filter based on dropout-driven consistency, which calibrates predictions and removes unreliable guidance. For the adaptation–generalization trade-off, we construct a domain-aware teacher by dynamically accumulating cross-domain semantics via incremental PCA, which continuously tracks domain shifts. Experiments show CTTA-T excels baselines.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表