# Finding Dino: A Plug-and-Play Framework for Zero-Shot Detection of Out-of-Distribution Objects Using Prototypes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.07664 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07664/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [A Baseline for Detecting Misclassified and Out-of-Distribution Examples in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02136/) (2016)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Deep Anomaly Detection with Outlier Exposure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04606/) (2018)
- [Likelihood Ratios for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02845/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation by Distilling Feature Correspondences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08414/) (2022)
- [Cut and Learn for Unsupervised Object Detection and Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11320/) (2023)
- [IDD: A Dataset for Exploring Problems of Autonomous Navigation in Unconstrained Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10200/) (2018)
- [SegmentMeIfYouCan: A Benchmark for Anomaly Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14812/) (2021)
- [Deep Industrial Image Anomaly Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11514/) (2023)
- [Detecting the Unexpected via Image Resynthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07595/) (2019)
- [Entropy Maximization and Meta Classification for Out-Of-Distribution Detection in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.06575/) (2020)
- [OW-DETR: Open-world Detection Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01513/) (2021)
- [The Fishyscapes Benchmark: Measuring Blind Spots in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03215/) (2019)
- [Pixel-wise Anomaly Detection in Complex Driving Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05445/) (2021)
- [Pixel-wise Energy-biased Abstention Learning for Anomaly Segmentation on Complex Urban Driving Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12264/) (2021)
- [RbA: Segmenting Unknown Regions Rejected by All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14293/) (2022)
- [PROB: Probabilistic Objectness for Open World Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01424/) (2022)
- [On Advantages of Mask-level Recognition for Outlier-aware Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.03407/) (2023)
- [Maskomaly:Zero-Shot Mask Anomaly Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16972/) (2023)
- [MODS -- A USV-oriented object detection and obstacle segmentation benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02359/) (2021)
- [Segment Every Out-of-Distribution Object](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16516/) (2023)
- [Far Away in the Deep Space: Dense Nearest-Neighbor-Based Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06660/) (2022)
- [Detecting the unknown in Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11641/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [CustomContrast: A Multilevel Contrastive Perspective For Subject-Driven Text-to-Image Customization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05606/) (2024)
- [ConceptPose: Training-Free Zero-Shot Object Pose Estimation using Concept Vectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.09056/) (2025)
- [Curriculum Fine-tuning of Vision Foundation Model for Medical Image Classification Under Label Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00150/) (2024)
- [Spurious-Aware Prototype Refinement for Reliable Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23881/) (2025)
- [Knowledge-Guided Failure Prediction: Detecting When Object Detectors Miss Safety-Critical Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25499/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Detecting and localising unknown or out-of-distribution (OOD) objects in any scene can be a challenging task in vision, particularly in safety-critical cases involving autonomous systems like automated vehicles or trains. Supervised anomaly segmentation or open-world object detection models depend on training on exhaustively annotated datasets for every domain and still struggle in distinguishing between background and OOD objects. In this work, we present a plug-and-play framework - PRototype-based OOD detection Without Labels (PROWL). It is an inference-based method that does not require training on the domain dataset and relies on extracting relevant features from self-supervised pre-trained models. PROWL can be easily adapted to detect in-domain objects in any operational design domain (ODD) in a zero-shot manner by specifying a list of known classes from this domain. PROWL, as a first zero-shot unsupervised method, achieves state-of-the-art results on the RoadAnomaly and RoadObstacle datasets provided in road driving benchmarks - SegmentMeIfYouCan (SMIYC) and Fishyscapes, as well as comparable performance against existing supervised methods trained without auxiliary OOD data. We also demonstrate its generalisability to other domains such as rail and maritime.