TTT-UCDR: Test-time Training for Universal Cross-Domain Retrieval

Image retrieval is a niche problem in computer vision curated towards finding similar images in a database using a query. In this work, for the first time in literature, we employ test-time training techniques for adapting to distribution shifts under Universal Cross-Domain Retrieval (UCDR). Test-time training has previously been shown to reduce generalization error for image classification, domain adaptation, semantic segmentation, and zero-shot sketch-based image retrieval (ZS-SBIR). In UCDR, in addition to the semantic shift of unknown categories present in ZS-SBIR, the presence of unknown domains leads to even higher distribution shifts. To bridge this domain gap, we use self-supervision through 3 different losses - Barlow Twins, Jigsaw Puzzle and RotNet on a pretrained network at test-time. This simple approach leads to improvements on UCDR benchmarks and also improves model robustness under a challenging cross-dataset generalization setting.