# The Open-World Lottery Ticket Hypothesis for OOD Intent Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.07071 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07071/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [A Baseline for Detecting Misclassified and Out-of-Distribution Examples in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02136/) (2016)
- [The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Finding Sparse, Trainable Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03635/) (2018)
- [Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05221/) (2022)
- [A Simple Unified Framework for Detecting Out-of-Distribution Samples and Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03888/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Deep Neural Networks are Easily Fooled: High Confidence Predictions for Unrecognizable Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.1897/) (2014)
- [Learning Sparse Neural Networks through L0 Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01312/) (2017)
- [ReAct: Out-of-distribution Detection With Rectified Activations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12797/) (2021)
- [Scaling Out-of-Distribution Detection for Real-World Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11132/) (2019)
- [Efficient Intent Detection with Dual Sentence Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04807/) (2020)
- [An Evaluation Dataset for Intent Classification and Out-of-Scope Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02027/) (2019)
- [Pretrained Transformers Improve Out-of-Distribution Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06100/) (2020)
- [Can Subnetwork Structure be the Key to Out-of-Distribution Generalization?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02890/) (2021)
- [Discovering New Intents with Deep Aligned Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08987/) (2020)
- [Low-Complexity Probing via Finding Subnetworks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03514/) (2021)
- [Out-of-domain Detection for Natural Language Understanding in Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03862/) (2019)
- [Modeling Discriminative Representations for Out-of-Domain Detection with Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14289/) (2021)
- [Out-of-Scope Intent Detection with Self-Supervision and Discriminative Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08616/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Calibrating the Confidence of Large Language Models by Eliciting Fidelity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02655/) (2024)
- [Calibration-Preserving Pruning: Compression as a Reliability Contract](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.23744/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Most existing methods of Out-of-Domain (OOD) intent classification rely on extensive auxiliary OOD corpora or specific training paradigms. However, they are underdeveloped in the underlying principle that the models should have differentiated confidence in In- and Out-of-domain intent. In this work, we shed light on the fundamental cause of model overconfidence on OOD and demonstrate that calibrated subnetworks can be uncovered by pruning the overparameterized model. Calibrated confidence provided by the subnetwork can better distinguish In- and Out-of-domain, which can be a benefit for almost all post hoc methods. In addition to bringing fundamental insights, we also extend the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis to open-world scenarios. We conduct extensive experiments on four real-world datasets to demonstrate our approach can establish consistent improvements compared with a suite of competitive baselines.
