# RUNA: Object-level Out-of-Distribution Detection via Regional Uncertainty Alignment of Multimodal Representations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.22285 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22285/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [A Baseline for Detecting Misclassified and Out-of-Distribution Examples in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02136/) (2016)
- [Glow: Generative Flow with Invertible 1x1 Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03039/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Energy-based Out-of-distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03759/) (2020)
- [BDD100K: A Diverse Driving Dataset for Heterogeneous Multitask Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04687/) (2018)
- [Deep Anomaly Detection with Outlier Exposure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04606/) (2018)
- [Out-of-Distribution Detection with Deep Nearest Neighbors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06507/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Training Confidence-calibrated Classifiers for Detecting Out-of-Distribution Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09325/) (2017)
- [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)
- [VOS: Learning What You Don't Know by Virtual Outlier Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01197/) (2022)
- [Delving into Out-of-Distribution Detection with Vision-Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13445/) (2022)
- [Reducing Network Agnostophobia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04110/) (2018)
- [Zero-Shot Out-of-Distribution Detection Based on the Pre-trained Model CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02748/) (2021)
- [Unknown-Aware Object Detection: Learning What You Don't Know from Videos in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03800/) (2022)
- [Understanding Anomaly Detection with Deep Invertible Networks through Hierarchies of Distributions and Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10848/) (2020)
- [Out-of-Distribution Detection for Automotive Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01413/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [CARE: Multi-Task Pretraining for Latent Continuous Action Representation in Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22467/) (2026)
- [Head-Aware Visual Cropping: Enhancing Fine-Grained VQA with Attention-Guided Subimage](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22483/) (2026)
- [FindMeIfYouCan: Bringing Open Set metrics to textitnear ,  textitfar  and textitfarther Out-of-Distribution Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14008/) (2025)
- [SAM3-O2D2: Zero-Shot Object Out-of-Distribution Detection by Object Class Prompting of the SAM3-Image Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.08281/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Enabling object detectors to recognize out-of-distribution (OOD) objects is vital for building reliable systems. A primary obstacle stems from the fact that models frequently do not receive supervisory signals from unfamiliar data, leading to overly confident predictions regarding OOD objects. Despite previous progress that estimates OOD uncertainty based on the detection model and in-distribution (ID) samples, we explore using pre-trained vision-language representations for object-level OOD detection. We first discuss the limitations of applying image-level CLIP-based OOD detection methods to object-level scenarios. Building upon these insights, we propose RUNA, a novel framework that leverages a dual encoder architecture to capture rich contextual information and employs a regional uncertainty alignment mechanism to distinguish ID from OOD objects effectively. We introduce a few-shot fine-tuning approach that aligns region-level semantic representations to further improve the model's capability to discriminate between similar objects. Our experiments show that RUNA substantially surpasses state-of-the-art methods in object-level OOD detection, particularly in challenging scenarios with diverse and complex object instances.