# AHA: Human-Assisted Out-of-Distribution Generalization and Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.08000 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08000/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 82 of its 114 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 82)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [A Baseline for Detecting Misclassified and Out-of-Distribution Examples in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02136/) (2016)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Invariant Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02893/) (2019)
- [A Simple Unified Framework for Detecting Out-of-Distribution Samples and Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03888/) (2018)
- [LSUN: Construction of a Large-scale Image Dataset using Deep Learning with Humans in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03365/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Distributionally Robust Neural Networks for Group Shifts: On the Importance of Regularization for Worst-Case Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08731/) (2019)
- [Deep CORAL: Correlation Alignment for Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01719/) (2016)
- [In Search of Lost Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01434/) (2020)
- [Deeper, Broader and Artier Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03077/) (2017)
- [Deep Anomaly Detection with Outlier Exposure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04606/) (2018)
- [Deep Bayesian Active Learning with Image Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.02910/) (2017)
- [Domain Generalization: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02503/) (2021)
- [Learning to Generalize: Meta-Learning for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03463/) (2017)
- [Out-of-Distribution Generalization via Risk Extrapolation (REx)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00688/) (2020)
- [Deep Batch Active Learning by Diverse, Uncertain Gradient Lower Bounds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03671/) (2019)
- [Out-of-Distribution Detection with Deep Nearest Neighbors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06507/) (2022)
- [Domain Generalization with MixStyle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02008/) (2021)
- [Continual Test-Time Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13591/) (2022)
- [ReAct: Out-of-distribution Detection With Rectified Activations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12797/) (2021)
- [SWAD: Domain Generalization by Seeking Flat Minima](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08604/) (2021)
- [Self-Challenging Improves Cross-Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02454/) (2020)
- [ViM: Out-Of-Distribution with Virtual-logit Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10807/) (2022)
- [Why ReLU networks yield high-confidence predictions far away from the training data and how to mitigate the problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05720/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Deep Active Learning in the Open World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.06353/) (2024)
- [Open-Insect: Benchmarking Open-Set Recognition of Novel Species in Biodiversity Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01691/) (2025)
- [V-CEM: Bridging Performance and Intervenability in Concept-based Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03978/) (2025)
- [Temp-SCONE: A Novel Out-of-Distribution Detection and Domain Generalization Framework for Wild Data with Temporal Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04571/) (2025)
- [FEVER-OOD: Free Energy Vulnerability Elimination for Robust Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01596/) (2024)
- [ASAT: Adaptive Scoring and Thresholding with Human Feedback for Robust Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02299/) (2025)
- [Unknown Aware AI-Generated Content Attribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.00218/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Modern machine learning models deployed often encounter distribution shifts in real-world applications, manifesting as covariate or semantic out-of-distribution (OOD) shifts. These shifts give rise to challenges in OOD generalization and OOD detection. This paper introduces a novel, integrated approach AHA (Adaptive Human-Assisted OOD learning) to simultaneously address both OOD generalization and detection through a human-assisted framework by labeling data in the wild. Our approach strategically labels examples within a novel maximum disambiguation region, where the number of semantic and covariate OOD data roughly equalizes. By labeling within this region, we can maximally disambiguate the two types of OOD data, thereby maximizing the utility of the fixed labeling budget. Our algorithm first utilizes a noisy binary search algorithm that identifies the maximal disambiguation region with high probability. The algorithm then continues with annotating inside the identified labeling region, reaping the full benefit of human feedback. Extensive experiments validate the efficacy of our framework. We observed that with only a few hundred human annotations, our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods that do not involve human assistance, in both OOD generalization and OOD detection. Code is publicly available at urlhttps://github.com/HaoyueBaiZJU/aha.