Test-Time Adaptation of Vision-Language Models for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation

Mehrdad Noori, David OSOWIECHI, Gustavo Vargas Hakim, Ali Bahri, Moslem Yazdanpanah, Sahar Dastani, Farzad Beizaee, Ismail Ayed, Christian Desrosiers

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 (NeurIPS 2025) Main Conference Track

Recently, test-time adaptation has attracted wide interest in the context of vision-language models for image classification. However, to the best of our knowledge, the problem is completely overlooked in dense prediction tasks such as Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation (OVSS). In response, we propose a novel TTA method tailored to adapting VLMs for segmentation during test time. Unlike TTA methods for image classification, our Multi-Level and Multi-Prompt (MLMP) entropy minimization integrates features from intermediate vision-encoder layers and is performed with different text-prompt templates at both the global CLS token and local pixel-wise levels. Our approach could be used as plug-and-play for any segmentation network, does not require additional training data or labels, and remains effective even with a single test sample. Furthermore, we introduce a comprehensive OVSS TTA benchmark suite, which integrates a rigorous evaluation protocol, nine segmentation datasets, 15 common synthetic corruptions, and additional real and rendered domain shifts, with a total of 87 distinct test scenarios, establishing a standardized and comprehensive testbed for future TTA research in open-vocabulary segmentation. Our experiments on this suite demonstrate that our segmentation-tailored method consistently delivers significant gains over direct adoption of TTA classification baselines. Code and data are available at https://github.com/dosowiechi/MLMP.