Robust facial expression recognition in unconstrained, 'in-the-wild' environments remains challenging due to significant domain shifts between training and testing distributions.
Existing test-time adaptation (TTA) approaches often require manual selection of parameters to update, resulting in suboptimal adaptation and high computational costs.
A novel Fisher-driven selective adaptation framework is introduced, which dynamically identifies and updates only the most critical model parameters based on their importance as quantified by Fisher information.
The proposed approach achieves a significant improvement in F1 score over the base model, while adapting only a small subset of parameters, making test-time adaptation more efficient and practical for real-world affective computing applications.