Mobility Helps Learning: Unsupervised Model Adaptation for Object Recognition via Movement

Movable agents, such as autonomous vehicles and robots, should be able to autonomously adapt their pre-trained object recognition models to new environments without human annotations. While existing test-time adaptation (TTA) methods address label-free model adaptation, they typically treat test data as independent snapshots, without constructively exploiting a rich, unique source of supervision: the significant variance in prediction quality as an agent observes the same object from different distances and viewpoints. To capitalize on this, we propose MoCaFe, a model-agnostic and hyperparameter-insensitive paradigm that leverages motion-induced prediction variance for unsupervised adaptation. Specifically, we first develop mobility-calibrated filtering of pseudo-labels, which constructs reliable pseudo-labels by fusing cross-view predictions using inverse-variance weights. The filtered pseudo-labels then guide the selection of ``hard samples'' for effective learning. To further suppress pseudo-label corruption, we introduce p-MoCaFe, an optional extension that uses a public dataset to assign weighting factors to data samples, yielding an estimator of the clean loss with bounded bias. Extensive experiments on autonomous driving (nuScenes, KITTI) and embodied-agent datasets show that MoCaFe significantly outperforms state-of-the-art TTA schemes, achieving up to approximately 20% accuracy gain.