# Harnessing Out-Of-Distribution Examples via Augmenting Content and Style

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.03162 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.03162/

## Key facts

- Cited by 43 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 55 of its 106 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [A Baseline for Detecting Misclassified and Out-of-Distribution Examples in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02136/) (2016)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Invariant Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02893/) (2019)
- [A Simple Unified Framework for Detecting Out-of-Distribution Samples and Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03888/) (2018)
- [Variational Inference: A Review for Statisticians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.00670/) (2016)
- [MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02249/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (2017)
- [Energy-based Out-of-distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03759/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Data Augmentation for Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12848/) (2019)
- [Virtual Adversarial Training: A Regularization Method for Supervised and Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03976/) (2017)
- [Robustness May Be at Odds with Accuracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.12152/) (2018)
- [AutoAugment: Learning Augmentation Policies from Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09501/) (2018)
- [Likelihood Ratios for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02845/) (2019)
- [Generalizing to Unseen Domains via Adversarial Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.12018/) (2018)
- [Why ReLU networks yield high-confidence predictions far away from the training data and how to mitigate the problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05720/) (2018)
- [Self-Supervised Learning with Data Augmentations Provably Isolates Content from Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04619/) (2021)
- [Generalizing Across Domains via Cross-Gradient Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.10745/) (2018)
- [Mitigating Neural Network Overconfidence with Logit Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09310/) (2022)
- [Representation Learning via Invariant Causal Mechanisms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07922/) (2020)
- [Universal Domain Adaptation through Self Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.07953/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Out-of-distribution Detection with Implicit Outlier Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05033/) (2023)
- [Few-Shot Adversarial Prompt Learning on Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14774/) (2024)
- [Learning to Augment Distributions for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01796/) (2023)
- [Out-of-distribution Detection Learning with Unreliable Out-of-distribution Sources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03236/) (2023)
- [Robust Generalization against Photon-Limited Corruptions via Worst-Case Sharpness Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13087/) (2023)
- [Watermarking for Out-of-distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15198/) (2022)
- [IDEAL: Influence-Driven Selective Annotations Empower In-Context Learners in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10873/) (2023)
- [Towards Effective Evaluations and Comparisons for LLM Unlearning Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09179/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Multi-domain Generalization with A General Learning Objective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18853/) (2024)
- [On the Over-Memorization During Natural, Robust and Catastrophic Overfitting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08847/) (2023)
- [FlatMatch: Bridging Labeled Data and Unlabeled Data with Cross-Sharpness for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16412/) (2023)
- [CHAMMI: A benchmark for channel-adaptive models in microscopy imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19224/) (2023)
- [Late Stopping: Avoiding Confidently Learning from Mislabeled Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13862/) (2023)
- [LLM Unlearning with LLM Beliefs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19422/) (2025)
- [How to Overcome Curse-of-Dimensionality for Out-of-Distribution Detection?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14452/) (2023)
- [Toward a Holistic Evaluation of Robustness in CLIP Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01534/) (2024)
- [Winning Prize Comes from Losing Tickets: Improve Invariant Learning by Exploring Variant Parameters for Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16391/) (2023)
- [PADDLES: Phase-Amplitude Spectrum Disentangled Early Stopping for Learning with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03462/) (2022)
- [AdLift: Lifting Adversarial Perturbations to Safeguard 3D Gaussian Splatting Assets Against Instruction-Driven Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07247/) (2025)
- [Causal Inference via Style Transfer for Out-of-distribution Generalisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03063/) (2022)
- [Jailbreaking the Non-Transferable Barrier via Test-Time Data Disguising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17198/) (2025)
- [Neural auto-designer for enhanced quantum kernels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11098/) (2024)
- [Toward Robust Non-Transferable Learning: A Survey and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13593/) (2025)
- [Mitigating Label Noise on Graph via Topological Sample Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01942/) (2024)
- [What Does Softmax Probability Tell Us about Classifiers Ranking Across Diverse Test Conditions?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09908/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Out-of-Distribution Detection on Imbalanced Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16430/) (2024)
- [Is Gradient Ascent Really Necessary? Memorize to Forget for Machine Unlearning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06441/) (2026)
- [Scalable Out-of-distribution Robustness in the Presence of Unobserved Confounders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19923/) (2024)
- [When Data-Free Knowledge Distillation Meets Non-Transferable Teacher: Escaping Out-of-Distribution Trap is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04119/) (2025)
- [Conditionally Invariant Representation Learning for Disentangling Cellular Heterogeneity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00558/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Machine learning models are vulnerable to Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) examples, and such a problem has drawn much attention. However, current methods lack a full understanding of different types of OOD data: there are benign OOD data that can be properly adapted to enhance the learning performance, while other malign OOD data would severely degenerate the classification result. To Harness OOD data, this paper proposes a HOOD method that can leverage the content and style from each image instance to identify benign and malign OOD data. Particularly, we design a variational inference framework to causally disentangle content and style features by constructing a structural causal model. Subsequently, we augment the content and style through an intervention process to produce malign and benign OOD data, respectively. The benign OOD data contain novel styles but hold our interested contents, and they can be leveraged to help train a style-invariant model. In contrast, the malign OOD data inherit unknown contents but carry familiar styles, by detecting them can improve model robustness against deceiving anomalies. Thanks to the proposed novel disentanglement and data augmentation techniques, HOOD can effectively deal with OOD examples in unknown and open environments, whose effectiveness is empirically validated in three typical OOD applications including OOD detection, open-set semi-supervised learning, and open-set domain adaptation.