Von Mises-Fisher Mixture Model with Dynamic Shrinkage for Realistic Test-Time Transduction

A range of methods aim to enhance the performance of vision-language models (VLMs) at test time. Among them, transduction has emerged as a promising paradigm due to its strong compatibility and efficiency. However, realistic evaluations often involve highly imbalanced class distributions, which cause performance degradation or even collapse. In this work, we systematically revisit transduction from the perspective of penalized likelihood estimation (PLE), showing that PLE with a KL-divergence anchor term naturally yields an adaptive shrinkage behavior between prior anchors and empirical estimates. From this viewpoint, the brittleness of transductive methods can be attributed to the absence of anchoring mechanism and static modeling of the shrinkage strength. Therefore, we propose Mixture of Von Mises-Fisher Models with Dynamic Shrinkage (MOON). MOON is built upon a mixture of von Mises-Fisher distributions to model feature representations on the unit hypersphere. To handle imbalance, MOON dynamically adjusts the shrinkage strength using zero-shot priors at both instance and class levels. Thus, it suppresses unreliable assignments and prevents harmful updates from outlier classes, thereby mitigating negative transfer. MOON is model-agnostic, training-free, and requires no task-specific hyperparameter tuning. Extensive experiments further validate the advantage of MOON in both performance and efficiency.