# A Bayesian Approach to OOD Robustness in Image Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.07277 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07277/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [Do ImageNet Classifiers Generalize to ImageNet?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10811/) (2019)
- [Generalized Cross Entropy Loss for Training Deep Neural Networks with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07836/) (2018)
- [Domain Generalization: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02503/) (2021)
- [Maximum Classifier Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02560/) (2017)
- [Learning from Noisy Labels with Deep Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08199/) (2020)
- [Robust Loss Functions under Label Noise for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.09482/) (2017)
- [Improving robustness against common corruptions by covariate shift adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16971/) (2020)
- [PARE: Part Attention Regressor for 3D Human Body Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08527/) (2021)
- [Bridging Theory and Algorithm for Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05801/) (2019)
- [Pretrained Transformers Improve Out-of-Distribution Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06100/) (2020)
- [Correlation Alignment for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01939/) (2016)
- [Towards Discriminability and Diversity: Batch Nuclear-norm Maximization under Label Insufficient Situations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12237/) (2020)
- [The Norm Must Go On: Dynamic Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00463/) (2021)
- [FixBi: Bridging Domain Spaces for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09230/) (2020)
- [Cycle Self-Training for Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03571/) (2021)
- [Tent: Fully Test-time Adaptation by Entropy Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10726/) (2020)
- [Robust Object Detection under Occlusion with Context-Aware CompositionalNets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11643/) (2020)
- [DINE: Domain Adaptation from Single and Multiple Black-box Predictors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01539/) (2021)
- [A Systematic Review of Robustness in Deep Learning for Computer Vision: Mind the gap?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00639/) (2021)
- [Compositional Convolutional Neural Networks: A Deep Architecture with Innate Robustness to Partial Occlusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04490/) (2020)
- [von Mises-Fisher Mixture Model-based Deep learning: Application to Face Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04264/) (2017)
- [OOD-CV: A Benchmark for Robustness to Out-of-Distribution Shifts of Individual Nuisances in Natural Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14341/) (2021)
- [Compositional Convolutional Neural Networks: A Robust and Interpretable Model for Object Recognition under Occlusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15538/) (2020)
- [A Survey of Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06745/) (2021)
- [Empirically Analyzing the Effect of Dataset Biases on Deep Face Recognition Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01619/) (2017)
- [Robust Instance Segmentation through Reasoning about Multi-Object Occlusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02107/) (2020)
- [Learning Part Segmentation through Unsupervised Domain Adaptation from Synthetic Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14098/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [The Universal Weight Subspace Hypothesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05117/) (2025)
- [EigenLoRAx: Recycling Adapters to Find Principal Subspaces for Resource-Efficient Adaptation and Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04700/) (2025)
- [UGG-ReID: Uncertainty-Guided Graph Model for Multi-Modal Object Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04638/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

An important and unsolved problem in computer vision is to ensure that the algorithms are robust to changes in image domains. We address this problem in the scenario where we have access to images from the target domains but no annotations. Motivated by the challenges of the OOD-CV benchmark where we encounter real world Out-of-Domain (OOD) nuisances and occlusion, we introduce a novel Bayesian approach to OOD robustness for object classification. Our work extends Compositional Neural Networks (CompNets), which have been shown to be robust to occlusion but degrade badly when tested on OOD data. We exploit the fact that CompNets contain a generative head defined over feature vectors represented by von Mises-Fisher (vMF) kernels, which correspond roughly to object parts, and can be learned without supervision. We obverse that some vMF kernels are similar between different domains, while others are not. This enables us to learn a transitional dictionary of vMF kernels that are intermediate between the source and target domains and train the generative model on this dictionary using the annotations on the source domain, followed by iterative refinement. This approach, termed Unsupervised Generative Transition (UGT), performs very well in OOD scenarios even when occlusion is present. UGT is evaluated on different OOD benchmarks including the OOD-CV dataset, several popular datasets (e.g., ImageNet-C [9]), artificial image corruptions (including adding occluders), and synthetic-to-real domain transfer, and does well in all scenarios outperforming SOTA alternatives (e.g. up to 10% top-1 accuracy on Occluded OOD-CV dataset).