Test-Time Prototype Adaptation for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation

Abstract

Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) repurposes a pretrained CLIP encoder for dense prediction without additional labeled supervision. Existing methods improve CLIP's spatial behavior either by redesigning its internal attention or by injecting features from auxiliary vision foundation models; both require access to the host's internal computation and are tailored to its specific forward pass. In this work, we propose Test-time Prototype Adaptation (TPA), a training-free plug-in that operates at the output level, leaving the host's forward pass and weights unmodified. By leveraging a lightweight transductive adaptation phase, TPA identifies confident anchor patches from the host's own output predictions on a small pool of unlabeled deployment-domain images, and aggregates their frozen DINO features into per-class prototypes; at inference, a single cosine similarity lookup against this frozen bank provides an auxiliary score fused linearly with the host's logits. TPA composes with five representative OVSS hosts spanning attention-redesign and VFM-injection designs, across three CLIP backbones, eight benchmarks, and multiple internal VFM choices. Under a single set of hyper-parameters and without per-host tuning or parameter updates, TPA consistently improves segmentation accuracy, with as few as approximately 10% of unlabeled deployment-domain images sufficing for effective bank construction on most benchmarks.