# Feature Protection For Out-of-distribution Generalization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.16027 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16027/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Natural Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07174/) (2019)
- [Moment Matching for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01754/) (2018)
- [Learning Robust Global Representations by Penalizing Local Predictive Power](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13549/) (2019)
- [Dark Experience for General Continual Learning: a Strong, Simple Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07211/) (2020)
- [Robust fine-tuning of zero-shot models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01903/) (2021)
- [Fine-Tuning can Distort Pretrained Features and Underperform Out-of-Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10054/) (2022)
- [Last Layer Re-Training is Sufficient for Robustness to Spurious Correlations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02937/) (2022)
- [Explicit Inductive Bias for Transfer Learning with Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01483/) (2018)
- [Finetune like you pretrain: Improved finetuning of zero-shot vision models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00638/) (2022)
- [Task-Specific Skill Localization in Fine-tuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06600/) (2023)
- [Multimodality Helps Unimodality: Cross-Modal Few-Shot Learning with Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06267/) (2023)
- [Continual Learning for Text Classification with Information Disentanglement Based Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05489/) (2021)
- [Probing Representation Forgetting in Supervised and Unsupervised Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13381/) (2022)
- [The Evolution of Out-of-Distribution Robustness Throughout Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15831/) (2021)
- [Domain-Adjusted Regression or: ERM May Already Learn Features Sufficient for Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06856/) (2022)
- [Simple and Fast Group Robustness by Automatic Feature Reweighting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11074/) (2023)
- [Trainable Projected Gradient Method for Robust Fine-tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10720/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the availability of large pre-trained models, a modern workflow for building real-world machine learning solutions is to fine-tune such models on a downstream task with a relatively small domain-specific dataset. In such applications, one major challenge is that the small fine-tuning dataset does not have sufficient coverage of the distribution encountered when the model is deployed. It is thus important to design fine-tuning methods that are robust to out-of-distribution (OOD) data that are under-represented by the training data. This paper compares common fine-tuning methods to investigate their OOD performance and demonstrates that standard methods will result in a significant change to the pre-trained model so that the fine-tuned features overfit the fine-tuning dataset. However, this causes deteriorated OOD performance. To overcome this issue, we show that protecting pre-trained features leads to a fine-tuned model more robust to OOD generalization. We validate the feature protection methods with extensive experiments of fine-tuning CLIP on ImageNet and DomainNet.