Cross-Architecture Adaptation: Cloud-Edge Continual Test-Time Adaptation with Dynamic Sampling and Heterogeneous Distillation

Cloud-Edge Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA)—with edge devices processing real-time data and the cloud offering strong computing power—is a critical paradigm for models that adapt to dynamic data distributions in real-world scenarios. However, most existing frameworks assume architectural homogeneity between cloud and edge CNNs, which poses a significant performance bottleneck, particularly given the rapid emergence of Transformer-based models. Current methods fail to bridge this architectural gap, resulting in significant deficiencies in adaptation accuracy and practical applicability. To address this, we propose a novel Cross-Architecture Adaptation (CAA) framework for heterogeneous Cloud-Edge CTTA that enables effective adaptation to shifting data distributions. Specifically, CAA deploys a large Transformer-based teacher model on the cloud for robust feature extraction and prediction, and a lightweight CNN-based student model on edge devices to fit resource constraints. Based on such cloud-edge models, a synergistic edge-to-cloud communication strategy, Multi-criteria Dynamic Cross-domain Sampling, ensures only the most informative, class-balanced samples are uploaded, minimizing communication costs while guaranteeing stable, unbiased adaptation. Moreover, a Multi-level Adaptive Heterogeneous Distillation module is proposed to facilitate effective knowledge transfer across the architecturally disparate models, and improve the learning efficiency of the edge one. Experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate that CAA achieves state-of-the-art performance with low edge resource consumption and minimal edge-to-cloud communication overhead.