Test-Time Modification: Inverse Domain Transformation for Robust Perception

Abstract

Generative foundation models contain broad visual knowledge and can produce diverse image variations, making them particularly promising for advancing domain generalization tasks. They can be used for training data augmentation, but synthesizing comprehensive target-domain variations remains slow, expensive, and incomplete. We propose an alternative: using diffusion models at test time to map target images back to the source distribution where the downstream model was trained. This approach requires only a source domain description, preserves the task model, and eliminates large-scale synthetic data generation. We demonstrate consistent improvements across segmentation, detection, and classification tasks under challenging environmental shifts in real-to-real domain generalization scenarios with unknown target distributions. Our analysis spans multiple generative and downstream models, including an ensemble variant for enhanced robustness. The method improves BDD100K-Night-Det mAP@50 from 10.2 to 31.8, ImageNet-R top-1 from 36.1 to 60.8, and DarkZurich mIoU from 28.6 to 46.3.