Zhilin Zhao

Zhilin Zhao, Longbing Cao, Yixuan Zhang et al.

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is critical for identifying test samples that deviate from in-distribution (ID) data, ensuring network robustness and reliability. This paper presents a flexible framework for OOD knowledge distillation that extracts OOD-sensitive information from a network to develop a binary classifier capable of distinguishing between ID and OOD samples in both scenarios, with and without access to training ID data. To accomplish this, we introduce Confidence Amendment (CA), an innovative methodology that transforms an OOD sample into an ID one while progressively amending prediction confidence derived from the network to enhance OOD sensitivity. This approach enables the simultaneous synthesis of both ID and OOD samples, each accompanied by an adjusted prediction confidence, thereby facilitating the training of a binary classifier sensitive to OOD. Theoretical analysis provides bounds on the generalization error of the binary classifier, demonstrating the pivotal role of confidence amendment in enhancing OOD sensitivity. Extensive experiments spanning various datasets and network architectures confirm the efficacy of the proposed method in detecting OOD samples.

Jiaming Zhou, Ke Ye, Jiayi Liu et al.

The generalization capabilities of vision-language-action (VLA) models to unseen tasks are crucial to achieving general-purpose robotic manipulation in open-world settings. However, the cross-task generalization capabilities of existing VLA models remain significantly underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce AGNOSTOS, a novel simulation benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate cross-task zero-shot generalization in manipulation. AGNOSTOS comprises 23 unseen manipulation tasks for testing, distinct from common training task distributions, and incorporates two levels of generalization difficulty to assess robustness. Our systematic evaluation reveals that current VLA models, despite being trained on diverse datasets, struggle to generalize effectively to these unseen tasks. To overcome this limitation, we propose Cross-Task In-Context Manipulation (X-ICM), a method that conditions large language models (LLMs) on in-context demonstrations from seen tasks to predict action sequences for unseen tasks. Additionally, we introduce a dynamics-guided sample selection strategy that identifies relevant demonstrations by capturing cross-task dynamics. On AGNOSTOS, X-ICM significantly improves cross-task zero-shot generalization performance over leading VLAs. We believe AGNOSTOS and X-ICM will serve as valuable tools for advancing general-purpose robotic manipulation.