# Negative Label Guided OOD Detection with Pretrained Vision-Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.20078 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20078/

## Key facts

- Cited by 66 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Prompt learning and adaptation of CLIP, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 35 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Mar 2024.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Prompt learning and adaptation of CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/prompt-learning-and-adaptation-of-clip/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [A Baseline for Detecting Misclassified and Out-of-Distribution Examples in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02136/) (2016)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Energy-based Out-of-distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03759/) (2020)
- [Learning Robust Global Representations by Penalizing Local Predictive Power](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13549/) (2019)
- [Large-Scale Long-Tailed Recognition in an Open World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05160/) (2019)
- [Out-of-Distribution Detection with Deep Nearest Neighbors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06507/) (2022)
- [GroupViT: Semantic Segmentation Emerges from Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11094/) (2022)
- [ReAct: Out-of-distribution Detection With Rectified Activations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12797/) (2021)
- [CSI: Novelty Detection via Contrastive Learning on Distributionally Shifted Instances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08176/) (2020)
- [Generalized ODIN: Detecting Out-of-distribution Image without Learning from Out-of-distribution Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11297/) (2020)
- [ViM: Out-Of-Distribution with Virtual-logit Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10807/) (2022)
- [Open-Set Recognition: a Good Closed-Set Classifier is All You Need?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06207/) (2021)
- [On the Importance of Gradients for Detecting Distributional Shifts in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00218/) (2021)
- [Exploring the Limits of Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03004/) (2021)
- [Mitigating Neural Network Overconfidence with Logit Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09310/) (2022)
- [Learning Confidence for Out-of-Distribution Detection in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04865/) (2018)
- [Delving into Out-of-Distribution Detection with Vision-Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13445/) (2022)
- [Extremely Simple Activation Shaping for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09858/) (2022)
- [Zero-Shot Out-of-Distribution Detection Based on the Pre-trained Model CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02748/) (2021)
- [CLIPN for Zero-Shot OOD Detection: Teaching CLIP to Say No](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12213/) (2023)
- [Non-Parametric Outlier Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02966/) (2023)
- [Semantically Coherent Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11941/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 66)

- [Generalized Out-of-Distribution Detection and Beyond in Vision Language Model Era: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21794/) (2024)
- [Out-of-Distribution Detection: A Task-Oriented Survey of Recent Advances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11884/) (2024)
- [LAPT: Label-driven Automated Prompt Tuning for OOD Detection with Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08966/) (2024)
- [OODD: Test-time Out-of-Distribution Detection with Dynamic Dictionary](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10468/) (2025)
- [AdaNeg: Adaptive Negative Proxy Guided OOD Detection with Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20149/) (2024)
- [Local-Prompt: Extensible Local Prompts for Few-Shot Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04796/) (2024)
- [Self-Calibrated Tuning of Vision-Language Models for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03359/) (2024)
- [CLIPScope: Enhancing Zero-Shot OOD Detection with Bayesian Scoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14737/) (2024)
- [Conjugated Semantic Pool Improves OOD Detection with Pre-trained Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08611/) (2024)
- [SeTAR: Out-of-Distribution Detection with Selective Low-Rank Approximation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12629/) (2024)
- [Noisy Test-Time Adaptation in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14604/) (2025)
- [ANTS: Adaptive Negative Textual Space Shaping for OOD Detection via Test-Time MLLM Understanding and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03951/) (2025)
- [Adaptive Multi-prompt Contrastive Network for Few-shot Out-of-distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17633/) (2025)
- [Mysteries of the Deep: Role of Intermediate Representations in Out of Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05782/) (2025)
- [Recent Advances in Out-of-Distribution Detection with CLIP-Like Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02448/) (2025)
- [From Open Vocabulary to Open World: Teaching Vision Language Models to Detect Novel Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18207/) (2024)
- [SimLabel: Consistency-Guided OOD Detection with Pretrained Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11485/) (2025)
- [FilterRAG: Zero-Shot Informed Retrieval-Augmented Generation to Mitigate Hallucinations in VQA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18536/) (2025)
- [VLMine: Long-Tail Data Mining with Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15486/) (2024)
- [What If the Input is Expanded in OOD Detection?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18472/) (2024)
- [Outlier Synthesis via Hamiltonian Monte Carlo for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.16718/) (2025)
- [Revisiting Logit Distributions for Reliable Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20134/) (2025)
- [A Benchmark and Evaluation for Real-World Out-of-Distribution Detection Using Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18463/) (2025)
- [Mitigating the Modality Gap: Few-Shot Out-of-Distribution Detection with Multi-modal Prototypes and Image Bias Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00662/) (2025)
- [Generalizable Prompt Learning of CLIP: A Brief Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01263/) (2025)
- [To Trust Or Not To Trust Your Vision-Language Model's Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23745/) (2025)
- [FA: Forced Prompt Learning of Vision-Language Models for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04511/) (2025)
- [Synthesizing Near-Boundary OOD Samples for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10225/) (2025)
- [Less Precise Can Be More Reliable: A Systematic Evaluation of Quantization's Impact on VLMs Beyond Accuracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21173/) (2025)
- [T-QPM: Enabling Temporal Out-Of-Distribution Detection and Domain Generalization for Vision-Language Models in Open-World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18481/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection aims at identifying samples from unknown classes, playing a crucial role in trustworthy models against errors on unexpected inputs. Extensive research has been dedicated to exploring OOD detection in the vision modality. Vision-language models (VLMs) can leverage both textual and visual information for various multi-modal applications, whereas few OOD detection methods take into account information from the text modality. In this paper, we propose a novel post hoc OOD detection method, called NegLabel, which takes a vast number of negative labels from extensive corpus databases. We design a novel scheme for the OOD score collaborated with negative labels. Theoretical analysis helps to understand the mechanism of negative labels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method NegLabel achieves state-of-the-art performance on various OOD detection benchmarks and generalizes well on multiple VLM architectures. Furthermore, our method NegLabel exhibits remarkable robustness against diverse domain shifts. The codes are available at https://github.com/tmlr-group/NegLabel.