# Out of Distribution Performance of State of Art Vision Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.10750 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10750/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 76 of its 79 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jan 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 76)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [Transformer-XL: Attentive Language Models Beyond a Fixed-Length Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02860/) (2019)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [Inception-v4, Inception-ResNet and the Impact of Residual Connections on Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07261/) (2016)
- [MLP-Mixer: An all-MLP Architecture for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01601/) (2021)
- [ImageNet-trained CNNs are biased towards texture; increasing shape bias improves accuracy and robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12231/) (2018)
- [Natural Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07174/) (2019)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Human Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09212/) (2019)
- [Swin Transformer V2: Scaling Up Capacity and Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09883/) (2021)
- [EfficientNetV2: Smaller Models and Faster Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00298/) (2021)
- [Learning Transferable Architectures for Scalable Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07012/) (2017)
- [Learning Robust Global Representations by Penalizing Local Predictive Power](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13549/) (2019)
- [Transformers in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01169/) (2021)
- [Designing Network Design Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13678/) (2020)

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

- [Exploring Kolmogorov-Arnold Network Expansions in Vision Transformers for Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04020/) (2025)
- [Vision Transformer Neural Architecture Search for Out-of-Distribution Generalization: Benchmark and Insights](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03782/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The vision transformer (ViT) has advanced to the cutting edge in the visual recognition task. Transformers are more robust than CNN, according to the latest research. ViT's self-attention mechanism, according to the claim, makes it more robust than CNN. Even with this, we discover that these conclusions are based on unfair experimental conditions and just comparing a few models, which did not allow us to depict the entire scenario of robustness performance. In this study, we investigate the performance of 58 state-of-the-art computer vision models in a unified training setup based not only on attention and convolution mechanisms but also on neural networks based on a combination of convolution and attention mechanisms, sequence-based model, complementary search, and network-based method. Our research demonstrates that robustness depends on the training setup and model types, and performance varies based on out-of-distribution type. Our research will aid the community in better understanding and benchmarking the robustness of computer vision models.