A Critical Evaluation of Open-World Machine Learning

Open-world machine learning (ML) combines closed-world models trained on in-distribution data with out-of-distribution (OOD) detectors, which aim to detect and reject OOD inputs. Previous works on open-world ML systems usually fail to test their reliability under diverse, and possibly adversarial conditions. Therefore, in this paper, we seek to understand how resilient are state-of-the-art open-world ML systems to changes in system components? With our evaluation across 6 OOD detectors, we find that the choice of in-distribution data, model architecture and OOD data have a strong impact on OOD detection performance, inducing false positive rates in excess of 70%. We further show that OOD inputs with 22 unintentional corruptions or adversarial perturbations render open-world ML systems unusable with false positive rates of up to 100%. To increase the resilience of open-world ML, we combine robust classifiers with OOD detection techniques and uncover a new trade-off between OOD detection and robustness.