# Adapting Contrastive Language-Image Pretrained (CLIP) Models for Out-of-Distribution Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.05828 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05828/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 73 of its 87 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 73)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Shortcut Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07780/) (2020)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [Concrete Problems in AI Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06565/) (2016)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [A Simple Unified Framework for Detecting Out-of-Distribution Samples and Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03888/) (2018)
- [Natural Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07174/) (2019)
- [Enhancing The Reliability of Out-of-distribution Image Detection in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02690/) (2017)
- [Self-training with Noisy Student improves ImageNet classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04252/) (2019)
- [Energy-based Out-of-distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03759/) (2020)
- [How transferable are features in deep neural networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1792/) (2014)
- [Reproducible scaling laws for contrastive language-image learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07143/) (2022)
- [Deep Anomaly Detection with Outlier Exposure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04606/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a comprehensive experimental study on pretrained feature extractors for visual out-of-distribution (OOD) detection, focusing on adapting contrastive language-image pretrained (CLIP) models. Without fine-tuning on the training data, we are able to establish a positive correlation (R2≥0.92) between in-distribution classification and unsupervised OOD detection for CLIP models in 4 benchmarks. We further propose a new simple and scalable method called textitpseudo-label probing (PLP) that adapts vision-language models for OOD detection. Given a set of label names of the training set, PLP trains a linear layer using the pseudo-labels derived from the text encoder of CLIP. To test the OOD detection robustness of pretrained models, we develop a novel feature-based adversarial OOD data manipulation approach to create adversarial samples. Intriguingly, we show that (i) PLP outperforms the previous state-of-the-art citepming2022mcm on all 5 large-scale benchmarks based on ImageNet, specifically by an average AUROC gain of 3.4% using the largest CLIP model (ViT-G), (ii) we show that linear probing outperforms fine-tuning by large margins for CLIP architectures (i.e. CLIP ViT-H achieves a mean gain of 7.3% AUROC on average on all ImageNet-based benchmarks), and (iii) billion-parameter CLIP models still fail at detecting adversarially manipulated OOD images. The code and adversarially created datasets will be made publicly available.