# Reliably Detecting Model Failures in Deployment Without Labels

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05047 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05047/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 76 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Understanding deep learning requires rethinking generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.03530/) (2016)
- [Do ImageNet Classifiers Generalize to ImageNet?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10811/) (2019)
- [WILDS: A Benchmark of in-the-Wild Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07421/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Fast and Accurate Deep Network Learning by Exponential Linear Units (ELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07289/) (2015)
- [Maximum Classifier Discrepancy for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02560/) (2017)
- [ADVENT: Adversarial Entropy Minimization for Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12833/) (2018)
- [Fantastic Generalization Measures and Where to Find Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02178/) (2019)
- [Likelihood Ratios for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02845/) (2019)
- [Detecting and Correcting for Label Shift with Black Box Predictors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03916/) (2018)
- [Revisiting Classifier Two-Sample Tests](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.06545/) (2016)
- [Failing Loudly: An Empirical Study of Methods for Detecting Dataset Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.11953/) (2018)
- [A Simple Fix to Mahalanobis Distance for Improving Near-OOD Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09022/) (2021)
- [Do CIFAR-10 Classifiers Generalize to CIFAR-10?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.00451/) (2018)
- [BREEDS: Benchmarks for Subpopulation Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.04859/) (2020)
- [Learning Deep Kernels for Non-Parametric Two-Sample Tests](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.09116/) (2020)
- [Regularized Learning for Domain Adaptation under Label Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.09734/) (2019)
- [Assessing Generalization of SGD via Disagreement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13799/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Out-of-Distribution Detection by Maximum Classifier Discrepancy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04951/) (2019)
- [Deep Unsupervised Domain Adaptation: A Review of Recent Advances and Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07422/) (2022)
- [Wild-Time: A Benchmark of in-the-Wild Distribution Shift over Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14238/) (2022)
- [Density of States Estimation for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09273/) (2020)
- [Variational Bayesian Last Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11599/) (2024)
- [Estimating Generalization under Distribution Shifts via Domain-Invariant Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03511/) (2020)
- [Deterministic PAC-Bayesian generalization bounds for deep networks via generalizing noise-resilience](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13344/) (2019)
- [f-Domain-Adversarial Learning: Theory and Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11344/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The distribution of data changes over time; models operating in dynamic environments need retraining. But knowing when to retrain, without access to labels, is an open challenge since some, but not all shifts degrade model performance. This paper formalizes and addresses the problem of post-deployment deterioration (PDD) monitoring. We propose D3M, a practical and efficient monitoring algorithm based on the disagreement of predictive models, achieving low false positive rates under non-deteriorating shifts and provides sample complexity bounds for high true positive rates under deteriorating shifts. Empirical results on both standard benchmark and a real-world large-scale internal medicine dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework and highlight its viability as an alert mechanism for high-stakes machine learning pipelines.
