# Benchmarking Out-of-Distribution Detection for Plankton Recognition: A Systematic Evaluation of Advanced Methods in Marine Ecological Monitoring

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.17179 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17179/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [Aggregated Residual Transformations for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05431/) (2016)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Generalized Out-of-Distribution Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11334/) (2021)
- [Deep Neural Networks are Easily Fooled: High Confidence Predictions for Unrecognizable Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.1897/) (2014)
- [Out-of-Distribution Detection with Deep Nearest Neighbors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06507/) (2022)
- [Towards Open Set Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06233/) (2015)
- [Fine-tuning CNN Image Retrieval with No Human Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02512/) (2017)
- [ReAct: Out-of-distribution Detection With Rectified Activations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12797/) (2021)
- [Scaling Out-of-Distribution Detection for Real-World Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11132/) (2019)
- [ViM: Out-Of-Distribution with Virtual-logit Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10807/) (2022)
- [Open-Set Recognition: a Good Closed-Set Classifier is All You Need?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06207/) (2021)
- [On the Importance of Gradients for Detecting Distributional Shifts in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00218/) (2021)
- [Extremely Simple Activation Shaping for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09858/) (2022)
- [A Simple Fix to Mahalanobis Distance for Improving Near-OOD Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09022/) (2021)
- [DICE: Leveraging Sparsification for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09805/) (2021)
- [RankFeat: Rank-1 Feature Removal for Out-of-distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08590/) (2022)
- [Fast Decision Boundary based Out-of-Distribution Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11536/) (2023)
- [No True State-of-the-Art? OOD Detection Methods are Inconsistent across Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05554/) (2021)
- [Neural Relation Graph: A Unified Framework for Identifying Label Noise and Outlier Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12321/) (2023)
- [A Unified Benchmark for the Unknown Detection Capability of Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00337/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automated plankton recognition models face significant challenges during real-world deployment due to distribution shifts (Out-of-Distribution, OoD) between training and test data. This stems from plankton's complex morphologies, vast species diversity, and the continuous discovery of novel species, which leads to unpredictable errors during inference. Despite rapid advancements in OoD detection methods in recent years, the field of plankton recognition still lacks a systematic integration of the latest computer vision developments and a unified benchmark for large-scale evaluation. To address this, this paper meticulously designed a series of OoD benchmarks simulating various distribution shift scenarios based on the DYB-PlanktonNet dataset cite875n-f104-21, and systematically evaluated twenty-two OoD detection methods. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the ViM citewang2022vim method significantly outperforms other approaches in our constructed benchmarks, particularly excelling in Far-OoD scenarios with substantial improvements in key metrics. This comprehensive evaluation not only provides a reliable reference for algorithm selection in automated plankton recognition but also lays a solid foundation for future research in plankton OoD detection. To our knowledge, this study marks the first large-scale, systematic evaluation and analysis of Out-of-Distribution data detection methods in plankton recognition. Code is available at https://github.com/BlackJack0083/PlanktonOoD.
