Batch-Conditioned Semantic Anchors for Robust Transductive Adaptation of Vision--Language Models

Transductive adaptation improves vision-language models at test time by refining predictions on an unlabeled batch, but current methods face a key trade-off. Aggressive approaches exploit batch structure but can drift when batches are sparse, have prior shift, or cover little of the label space. Conservative methods better preserve CLIP text semantics, but fixed semantic references can under-adapt even when the batch provides strong corrective evidence. We propose JPTA (Joint Prior and Transport Adaptation), a prior-aware framework that casts transductive VLM adaptation as batch-conditioned semantic reference estimation. Instead of treating CLIP text prototypes as fixed priors or freely replaceable, JPTA views them as semantic references that shift toward image-side batch structure only under calibrated evidence. It estimates batch priors and soft image-side prototypes to form transported semantic references whose impact is scaled by batch reliability. Across standard benchmarks, low effective-class regimes, all-class evaluation, and online streams, JPTA consistently outperforms TransCLIP and StatA, with the largest gains on sparse and prior-shifted batches. Anchor-drift, active-support, and absent-class-mass diagnostics show that JPTA fixes effective-class mismatch without unconstrained transductive drift, indicating that robust transductive VLM adaptation should recalibrate semantic references using reliable batch evidence rather than choose between unrestricted transduction and fixed prototypes. Code is available at https://github.com/MR-Sherif/JPTA.git.