A Systematic Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Detection Under Representation and Training Paradigm Shifts
This work provides statistically grounded guidance for method selection in out-of-distribution detection, addressing a critical problem for machine learning practitioners dealing with distribution shifts, though it is incremental in nature.
The paper systematically compared out-of-distribution detection methods across different representation paradigms, finding that the learned feature space largely determines efficacy, with probabilistic scores dominating misclassification detection and geometry-aware scores performing better under stronger shifts on CNNs.
We present a systematic comparison of out-of-distribution (OOD) detection methods across CLIP-stratified regimes using AURC and AUGRC as primary metrics. Experiments cover two representation paradigms: CNNs trained from scratch and a fine-tuned Vision Transformer (ViT), evaluated on CIFAR-10/100, SuperCIFAR-100, and TinyImageNet. Using a multiple-comparison-controlled, rank-based pipeline (Friedman test with Conover-Holm post-hoc) and Bron-Kerbosch cliques, we find that the learned feature space largely determines OOD efficacy. For both CNNs and ViTs, probabilistic scores (e.g., MSR, GEN) dominate misclassification (ID) detection. Under stronger shifts, geometry-aware scores (e.g., NNGuide, fDBD, CTM) prevail on CNNs, whereas on ViTs GradNorm and KPCA Reconstruction Error remain consistently competitive. We further show a class-count-dependent trade-off for Monte-Carlo Dropout (MCD) and that a simple PCA projection improves several detectors. These results support a representation-centric view of OOD detection and provide statistically grounded guidance for method selection under distribution shift.