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Out-of-distribution (OOD) prediction is often approached by restricting models to causal or invariant covariates, avoiding non-causal spurious associations that may be unstable across environments. Despite its theoretical appeal, this…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-06 Shuozhi Zuo , Yixin Wang

The distribution of a neural network's latent representations has been successfully used to detect out-of-distribution (OOD) data. This work investigates whether this distribution moreover correlates with a model's epistemic uncertainty,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-24 Janis Postels , Hermann Blum , Yannick Strümpler , Cesar Cadena , Roland Siegwart , Luc Van Gool , Federico Tombari

Covariate-shift generalization, a typical case in out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, requires a good performance on the unknown test distribution, which varies from the accessible training distribution in the form of covariate shift.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-18 Renzhe Xu , Xingxuan Zhang , Zheyan Shen , Tong Zhang , Peng Cui

Generalization remains a central yet unresolved challenge in deep learning, particularly the ability to predict a model's performance beyond its training distribution using quantities available prior to test-time evaluation. Building on the…

Out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization is a complicated problem due to the idiosyncrasies of possible distribution shifts between training and test domains. Most benchmarks employ diverse datasets to address this issue; however, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-18 Kaican Li , Yifan Zhang , Lanqing Hong , Zhenguo Li , Nevin L. Zhang

In the field of Machine Learning (ML) and data-driven applications, one of the significant challenge is the change in data distribution between the training and deployment stages, commonly known as distribution shift. This paper outlines…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Lakpa Tamang , Mohamed Reda Bouadjenek , Richard Dazeley , Sunil Aryal

Many machine learning methods assume that the training and test data follow the same distribution. However, in the real world, this assumption is very often violated. In particular, the phenomenon that the marginal distribution of the data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-20 Masanari Kimura , Hideitsu Hino

Recently, invariant risk minimization (IRM) was proposed as a promising solution to address out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. However, it is unclear when IRM should be preferred over the widely-employed empirical risk minimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-22 Kartik Ahuja , Jun Wang , Amit Dhurandhar , Karthikeyan Shanmugam , Kush R. Varshney

Modern machine learning methods and the availability of large-scale data have significantly advanced our ability to predict target quantities from large sets of covariates. However, these methods often struggle under distributional shifts,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-24 Nicola Gnecco , Jonas Peters , Sebastian Engelke , Niklas Pfister

Rapid progress in representation learning has led to a proliferation of embedding models, and to associated challenges of model selection and practical application. It is non-trivial to assess a model's generalizability to new, candidate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-18 Leo Betthauser , Urszula Chajewska , Maurice Diesendruck , Rohith Pesala

Most machine learning models operate under the assumption that the training, testing and deployment data is independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.). This assumption doesn't generally hold true in a natural setting. Usually, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-14 Kumud Lakara , Akshat Bhandari , Pratinav Seth , Ujjwal Verma

Deep neural networks often face generalization problems to handle out-of-distribution (OOD) data, and there remains a notable theoretical gap between the contributing factors and their respective impacts. Literature evidence from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-24 Songming Zhang , Yuxiao Luo , Qizhou Wang , Haoang Chi , Xiaofeng Chen , Bo Han , Jinyan Li

In recent years, machine learning models have achieved success based on the independently and identically distributed assumption. However, this assumption can be easily violated in real-world applications, leading to the Out-of-Distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-27 Yifan Hao , Yong Lin , Difan Zou , Tong Zhang

Most research designing novel predictive models, or employing existing ones, assumes that training and testing data are independent and identically distributed. In practice, the data encountered at serving time often deviate from the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-30 Hanyu Duan , Yi Yang , Ahmed Abbasi , Kar Yan Tam

Many existing approaches to generalizing statistical inference amidst distribution shift operate under the covariate shift assumption, which posits that the conditional distribution of unobserved variables given observable ones is invariant…

Applications · Statistics 2024-12-13 Ying Jin , Naoki Egami , Dominik Rothenhäusler

Out-of-Distribution (OOD) Generalization aims to learn robust models that generalize well to various environments without fitting to distribution-specific features. Recent studies based on Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) address this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-26 Zhuo Huang , Muyang Li , Li Shen , Jun Yu , Chen Gong , Bo Han , Tongliang Liu

Practitioners often face the challenge of deploying prediction models in new environments with shifted distributions of covariates and responses. With observational data, such shifts are often driven by unobserved confounding, and can in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Kulunu Dharmakeerthi , YoonHaeng Hur , Tengyuan Liang

Although pretrained Transformers such as BERT achieve high accuracy on in-distribution examples, do they generalize to new distributions? We systematically measure out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization for seven NLP datasets by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-04-17 Dan Hendrycks , Xiaoyuan Liu , Eric Wallace , Adam Dziedzic , Rishabh Krishnan , Dawn Song

This paper investigates the problem of learning robust, generalizable prediction models from a combination of multiple datasets and qualitative assumptions about the underlying data-generating model. Part of the challenge of learning robust…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-04 Alexis Bellot , Mihaela van der Schaar

Neural networks make accurate predictions but often fail to provide reliable uncertainty estimates, especially under covariate distribution shifts between training and testing. To address this problem, we propose a Bayesian framework for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-22 Yuli Slavutsky , David M. Blei