Prior-free Tabular Test-time Adaptation

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been effectively deployed in tabular data modeling for various applications. However, these models suffer severe performance degradation when distribution shifts exist between training and test tabular data. While test-time adaptation (TTA) serves as a promising solution to distribution shifts, existing TTA methods primarily focus on visual modalities and demonstrate poor adaptation when directly applied to tabular modality. Recent efforts have proposed tabular-specific TTA approaches to mitigate distribution shifts on tabular data. Nevertheless, these methods inherently assume the accessibility of source domain or prior and fail to fundamentally address feature shift while overlooking unique characteristics of tabular data, leading to suboptimal adaptation. In this paper, we focus on the problem of prior-free tabular test-time adaptation where no access to source data and any prior knowledge is allowed, and we propose a novel method, Prior-Free Tabular Test-Time Adaptation (PFT$_3$A), which has three designs to simultaneously address label shift and feature shift without source domain or prior access. Specially, PFT$_3$A contains the Class Prior Estimating module for estimating source-target class priors to calibrate prediction, eliminating dependency on source class prior and mitigating label shift; the Robust Feature Learning module for learning robust feature by aligning source-like and target-like features to mitigate feature shift; the Representative Subspace Exploration module for eliminating redundant features by projecting feature into subspace to enhance feature alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of PFT$_3$A in tabular TTA tasks. The implementation is at https://github.com/rundohe/PFT3A.