# Evaluation of autonomous systems under data distribution shifts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.20046 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.20046/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [A Baseline for Detecting Misclassified and Out-of-Distribution Examples in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02136/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Can You Trust Your Model's Uncertainty? Evaluating Predictive Uncertainty Under Dataset Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02530/) (2019)
- [End to End Learning for Self-Driving Cars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07316/) (2016)
- [CSI: Novelty Detection via Contrastive Learning on Distributionally Shifted Instances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08176/) (2020)
- [A Unifying Review of Deep and Shallow Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11732/) (2020)
- [Generalized ODIN: Detecting Out-of-distribution Image without Learning from Out-of-distribution Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11297/) (2020)
- [Deep Learning for Anomaly Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.03407/) (2019)
- [MOS: Towards Scaling Out-of-distribution Detection for Large Semantic Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01879/) (2021)
- [Generative Probabilistic Novelty Detection with Adversarial Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02588/) (2018)
- [Out-of-Distribution Detection using Multiple Semantic Label Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06664/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Out-of-Distribution Detection for Safety Assurance of AI and Autonomous Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21254/) (2025)
- [When Environments Shift: Safe Planning with Generative Priors and Robust Conformal Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12616/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We posit that data can only be safe to use up to a certain threshold of the data distribution shift, after which control must be relinquished by the autonomous system and operation halted or handed to a human operator. With the use of a computer vision toy example we demonstrate that network predictive accuracy is impacted by data distribution shifts and propose distance metrics between training and testing data to define safe operation limits within said shifts. We conclude that beyond an empirically obtained threshold of the data distribution shift, it is unreasonable to expect network predictive accuracy not to degrade