# On the Impact of Spurious Correlation for Out-of-distribution Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.05642 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05642/

## Key facts

- Cited by 68 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [A Baseline for Detecting Misclassified and Out-of-Distribution Examples in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02136/) (2016)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [Invariant Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02893/) (2019)
- [Glow: Generative Flow with Invertible 1x1 Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03039/) (2018)
- [A Simple Unified Framework for Detecting Out-of-Distribution Samples and Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03888/) (2018)
- [ImageNet-trained CNNs are biased towards texture; increasing shape bias improves accuracy and robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12231/) (2018)
- [LSUN: Construction of a Large-scale Image Dataset using Deep Learning with Humans in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03365/) (2015)
- [Enhancing The Reliability of Out-of-distribution Image Detection in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02690/) (2017)
- [Energy-based Out-of-distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03759/) (2020)
- [Can You Trust Your Model's Uncertainty? Evaluating Predictive Uncertainty Under Dataset Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02530/) (2019)
- [Distributionally Robust Neural Networks for Group Shifts: On the Importance of Regularization for Worst-Case Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08731/) (2019)
- [Deep CORAL: Correlation Alignment for Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01719/) (2016)
- [In Search of Lost Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01434/) (2020)
- [Deep Neural Networks are Easily Fooled: High Confidence Predictions for Unrecognizable Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.1897/) (2014)
- [Out-of-Distribution Generalization via Risk Extrapolation (REx)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00688/) (2020)
- [Recognition in Terra Incognita](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04975/) (2018)
- [Causal inference using invariant prediction: identification and confidence intervals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.01332/) (2015)
- [Likelihood Ratios for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02845/) (2019)
- [Do Deep Generative Models Know What They Don't Know?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.09136/) (2018)
- [Generalized ODIN: Detecting Out-of-distribution Image without Learning from Out-of-distribution Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11297/) (2020)
- [Confounding variables can degrade generalization performance of radiological deep learning models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00431/) (2018)
- [Noise or Signal: The Role of Image Backgrounds in Object Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09994/) (2020)
- [The Risks of Invariant Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05761/) (2020)
- [MOS: Towards Scaling Out-of-distribution Detection for Large Semantic Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01879/) (2021)
- [Why Normalizing Flows Fail to Detect Out-of-Distribution Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08545/) (2020)
- [Learning De-biased Representations with Biased Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02806/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 68)

- [Generalized Out-of-Distribution Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11334/) (2021)
- [Delving into Out-of-Distribution Detection with Vision-Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13445/) (2022)
- [OpenOOD v1.5: Enhanced Benchmark for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09301/) (2023)
- [A Unified Survey on Anomaly, Novelty, Open-Set, and Out-of-Distribution Detection: Solutions and Future Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14051/) (2021)
- [Is Out-of-Distribution Detection Learnable?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14707/) (2022)
- [POEM: Out-of-Distribution Detection with Posterior Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13687/) (2022)
- [LoCoOp: Few-Shot Out-of-Distribution Detection via Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01293/) (2023)
- [ARGS: Alignment as Reward-Guided Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01694/) (2024)
- [Process Reward Model with Q-Value Rankings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11287/) (2024)
- [Provable Guarantees for Understanding Out-of-distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00787/) (2021)
- [Negative Label Guided OOD Detection with Pretrained Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20078/) (2024)
- [Full-Spectrum Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05306/) (2022)
- [ProMix: Combating Label Noise via Maximizing Clean Sample Utility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10276/) (2022)
- [Are Vision Transformers Robust to Spurious Correlations?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09125/) (2022)
- [How Does Unlabeled Data Provably Help Out-of-Distribution Detection?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03502/) (2024)
- [Generalized Out-of-Distribution Detection and Beyond in Vision Language Model Era: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21794/) (2024)
- [MM-SpuBench: Towards Better Understanding of Spurious Biases in Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17126/) (2024)
- [Out-of-distribution Detection Learning with Unreliable Out-of-distribution Sources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03236/) (2023)
- [Understanding the Feature Norm for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05316/) (2023)
- [Self-Calibrated Tuning of Vision-Language Models for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03359/) (2024)
- [ATTA: Anomaly-aware Test-Time Adaptation for Out-of-Distribution Detection in Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05994/) (2023)
- [Unified Out-Of-Distribution Detection: A Model-Specific Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06813/) (2023)
- [Exploring Large Language Models for Multi-Modal Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08027/) (2023)
- [The Value of Out-of-Distribution Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10967/) (2022)
- [Domain Generalization via Nuclear Norm Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07527/) (2023)
- [On the Powerfulness of Textual Outlier Exposure for Visual OoD Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16492/) (2023)
- [Towards out of distribution generalization for problems in mechanics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14917/) (2022)
- [Meta OOD Learning for Continuously Adaptive OOD Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11705/) (2023)
- [Projection Regret: Reducing Background Bias for Novelty Detection via Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02615/) (2023)
- [Invariant Anomaly Detection under Distribution Shifts: A Causal Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14329/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Modern neural networks can assign high confidence to inputs drawn from outside the training distribution, posing threats to models in real-world deployments. While much research attention has been placed on designing new out-of-distribution (OOD) detection methods, the precise definition of OOD is often left in vagueness and falls short of the desired notion of OOD in reality. In this paper, we present a new formalization and model the data shifts by taking into account both the invariant and environmental (spurious) features. Under such formalization, we systematically investigate how spurious correlation in the training set impacts OOD detection. Our results suggest that the detection performance is severely worsened when the correlation between spurious features and labels is increased in the training set. We further show insights on detection methods that are more effective in reducing the impact of spurious correlation and provide theoretical analysis on why reliance on environmental features leads to high OOD detection error. Our work aims to facilitate a better understanding of OOD samples and their formalization, as well as the exploration of methods that enhance OOD detection.