We introduce a pioneering approach to self-supervised learning for point clouds, employing a geometrically informed mask selection strategy called GeoMask3D (GM3D) to boost the efficiency of Masked Auto Encoders (MAE). Unlike the conventional method of random masking, our technique utilizes a teacher-student model to focus on intricate areas within the data, guiding the model's focus toward regions with higher geometric complexity. This strategy is grounded in the hypothesis that concentrating on harder patches yields a more robust feature representation, as evidenced by the improved performance on downstream tasks. Our method also presents a complete-to-partial feature-level knowledge distillation technique designed to guide the prediction of geometric complexity utilizing a comprehensive context from feature-level information. Extensive experiments confirm our method's superiority over State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) baselines, demonstrating marked improvements in classification, and few-shot tasks.
Pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), exemplified by CLIP, demonstrate remarkable adaptability across zero-shot classification tasks without additional training. However, their performance diminishes in the presence of domain shifts. In this study, we introduce CLIP Adaptation duRing Test-Time (CLIPArTT), a fully test-time adaptation (TTA) approach for CLIP, which involves automatic text prompts construction during inference for their use as text supervision. Our method employs a unique, minimally invasive text prompt tuning process, wherein multiple predicted classes are aggregated into a single new text prompt, used as pseudo label to re-classify inputs in a transductive manner. Additionally, we pioneer the standardization of TTA benchmarks (e.g., TENT) in the realm of VLMs. Our findings demonstrate that, without requiring additional transformations nor new trainable modules, CLIPArTT enhances performance dynamically across non-corrupted datasets such as CIFAR-10, corrupted datasets like CIFAR-10-C and CIFAR-10.1, alongside synthetic datasets such as VisDA-C. This research underscores the potential for improving VLMs' adaptability through novel test-time strategies, offering insights for robust performance across varied datasets and environments. The code can be found at: https://github.com/dosowiechi/CLIPArTT.git