Adapt-As-You-Walk Through the Clouds: Training-Free Online Test-Time Adaptation of 3D Vision-Language Foundation Models

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Authors: Association for Artificial Intelligence 2026, Mohammadreza Alimoradijazi, Aijun An, Ali Cheraghian, Hamidreza Dastmalchi, Morteza Saberi, Mehran Tamjidi
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Abstract

3D Vision-Language Foundation Models (VLFMs) have shown strong generalization and zero-shot recognition capabilities in open-world point cloud processing tasks. However, these models often underperform in practical scenarios where data are noisy, incomplete, or drawn from a different distribution than the training data. To address this, we propose \textbf{Uni-Adapter}, a novel training-free online test-time adaptation (TTA) strategy for 3D VLFMs based on dynamic prototype learning. We define a 3D cache to store class-specific cluster centers as prototypes, which are continuously updated to capture intra-class variability in heterogeneous data distributions. These dynamic prototypes serve as anchors for cache-based logit computation via similarity scoring. Simultaneously, a graph-based label smoothing module captures inter-prototype similarities to enforce label consistency among similar prototypes. Finally, we unify predictions from the original 3D VLFM and the refined 3D cache using entropy-weighted aggregation for reliable adaptation. Without retraining, Uni-Adapter effectively mitigates distribution shifts, achieving state-of-the-art performance on diverse 3D benchmarks over different 3D VLFMs—improving ModelNet-40C by \textbf{10.55\%}, ScanObjectNN-C by \textbf{8.26\%}, and ShapeNet-C by \textbf{4.49\%} over the source 3D VLFMs.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning 3D Shape Modeling and Analysis Advanced Neural Network Applications

Publication details

Journal / source
Underline Science Inc.
Publication date
7 January 2026
Language
EN