# Bridging Domain Expertise and Generalization for Performance Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.06335 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06335/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [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)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [A Baseline for Detecting Misclassified and Out-of-Distribution Examples in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02136/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [Do ImageNet Classifiers Generalize to ImageNet?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10811/) (2019)
- [Understanding Contrastive Representation Learning through Alignment and Uniformity on the Hypersphere](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10242/) (2020)
- [WILDS: A Benchmark of in-the-Wild Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07421/) (2020)
- [Learning Transferable Features with Deep Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02791/) (2015)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (2017)
- [Self-training with Noisy Student improves ImageNet classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04252/) (2019)
- [How transferable are features in deep neural networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1792/) (2014)
- [Learning Robust Global Representations by Penalizing Local Predictive Power](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13549/) (2019)
- [Do We Really Need to Access the Source Data? Source Hypothesis Transfer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08546/) (2020)
- [Deep Domain Confusion: Maximizing for Domain Invariance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3474/) (2014)
- [Revisiting the Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07998/) (2021)
- [Functional Map of the World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07846/) (2017)
- [Universal Source-Free Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04393/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Leveraging Unlabeled Data to Predict Out-of-Distribution Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04234/) (2022)
- [Data Determines Distributional Robustness in Contrastive Language Image Pre-training (CLIP)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01397/) (2022)
- [Assessing Generalization of SGD via Disagreement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13799/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Teacher-Anchored Selection of Post-Training Quantized Models under Domain Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.31155/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Performance estimation under distribution shift aims to predict how a model behaves on an unlabeled test set whose distribution differs from the training data, a scenario that requires reliable indicators that can faithfully reflect model behavior without ground-truth labels. Existing approaches rely solely on the outputs of the given model whose biases are amplified once the distribution shifts, weakening the correlation with the true performance. Motivated by this limitation, we propose Fused Reference Alignment Prediction (FRAP), which leverages the complementary strengths of an external foundation model and the base model to construct a more reliable surrogate of the ground-truth labels. FRAP aligns the prediction distribution of the foundation model with that of the base model by applying temperature-scaled calibration that minimizes their divergence. The aligned predictions are fused through confidence-based weighting into a refined reference distribution that integrates robustness from the foundation model and domain-specific expertise from the base model, and performance estimation is obtained by measuring how closely the base model predictions agree with this reference. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets and architectures show that FRAP provides consistent and substantial improvements over representative performance-estimation methods under distribution shift.