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SubscribeEnhanced OoD Detection through Cross-Modal Alignment of Multi-Modal Representations
Prior research on out-of-distribution detection (OoDD) has primarily focused on single-modality models. Recently, with the advent of large-scale pretrained vision-language models such as CLIP, OoDD methods utilizing such multi-modal representations through zero-shot and prompt learning strategies have emerged. However, these methods typically involve either freezing the pretrained weights or only partially tuning them, which can be suboptimal for downstream datasets. In this paper, we highlight that multi-modal fine-tuning (MMFT) can achieve notable OoDD performance. Despite some recent works demonstrating the impact of fine-tuning methods for OoDD, there remains significant potential for performance improvement. We investigate the limitation of na\"ive fine-tuning methods, examining why they fail to fully leverage the pretrained knowledge. Our empirical analysis suggests that this issue could stem from the modality gap within in-distribution (ID) embeddings. To address this, we propose a training objective that enhances cross-modal alignment by regularizing the distances between image and text embeddings of ID data. This adjustment helps in better utilizing pretrained textual information by aligning similar semantics from different modalities (i.e., text and image) more closely in the hyperspherical representation space. We theoretically demonstrate that the proposed regularization corresponds to the maximum likelihood estimation of an energy-based model on a hypersphere. Utilizing ImageNet-1k OoD benchmark datasets, we show that our method, combined with post-hoc OoDD approaches leveraging pretrained knowledge (e.g., NegLabel), significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art OoDD performance and leading ID accuracy.
Meta OOD Learning for Continuously Adaptive OOD Detection
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is crucial to modern deep learning applications by identifying and alerting about the OOD samples that should not be tested or used for making predictions. Current OOD detection methods have made significant progress when in-distribution (ID) and OOD samples are drawn from static distributions. However, this can be unrealistic when applied to real-world systems which often undergo continuous variations and shifts in ID and OOD distributions over time. Therefore, for an effective application in real-world systems, the development of OOD detection methods that can adapt to these dynamic and evolving distributions is essential. In this paper, we propose a novel and more realistic setting called continuously adaptive out-of-distribution (CAOOD) detection which targets on developing an OOD detection model that enables dynamic and quick adaptation to a new arriving distribution, with insufficient ID samples during deployment time. To address CAOOD, we develop meta OOD learning (MOL) by designing a learning-to-adapt diagram such that a good initialized OOD detection model is learned during the training process. In the testing process, MOL ensures OOD detection performance over shifting distributions by quickly adapting to new distributions with a few adaptations. Extensive experiments on several OOD benchmarks endorse the effectiveness of our method in preserving both ID classification accuracy and OOD detection performance on continuously shifting distributions.
A Bayesian Approach to OOD Robustness in Image Classification
An important and unsolved problem in computer vision is to ensure that the algorithms are robust to changes in image domains. We address this problem in the scenario where we have access to images from the target domains but no annotations. Motivated by the challenges of the OOD-CV benchmark where we encounter real world Out-of-Domain (OOD) nuisances and occlusion, we introduce a novel Bayesian approach to OOD robustness for object classification. Our work extends Compositional Neural Networks (CompNets), which have been shown to be robust to occlusion but degrade badly when tested on OOD data. We exploit the fact that CompNets contain a generative head defined over feature vectors represented by von Mises-Fisher (vMF) kernels, which correspond roughly to object parts, and can be learned without supervision. We obverse that some vMF kernels are similar between different domains, while others are not. This enables us to learn a transitional dictionary of vMF kernels that are intermediate between the source and target domains and train the generative model on this dictionary using the annotations on the source domain, followed by iterative refinement. This approach, termed Unsupervised Generative Transition (UGT), performs very well in OOD scenarios even when occlusion is present. UGT is evaluated on different OOD benchmarks including the OOD-CV dataset, several popular datasets (e.g., ImageNet-C [9]), artificial image corruptions (including adding occluders), and synthetic-to-real domain transfer, and does well in all scenarios outperforming SOTA alternatives (e.g. up to 10% top-1 accuracy on Occluded OOD-CV dataset).
So-Fake: Benchmarking and Explaining Social Media Image Forgery Detection
Recent advances in AI-powered generative models have enabled the creation of increasingly realistic synthetic images, posing significant risks to information integrity and public trust on social media platforms. While robust detection frameworks and diverse, large-scale datasets are essential to mitigate these risks, existing academic efforts remain limited in scope: current datasets lack the diversity, scale, and realism required for social media contexts, while detection methods struggle with generalization to unseen generative technologies. To bridge this gap, we introduce So-Fake-Set, a comprehensive social media-oriented dataset with over 2 million high-quality images, diverse generative sources, and photorealistic imagery synthesized using 35 state-of-the-art generative models. To rigorously evaluate cross-domain robustness, we establish a novel and large-scale (100K) out-of-domain benchmark (So-Fake-OOD) featuring synthetic imagery from commercial models explicitly excluded from the training distribution, creating a realistic testbed for evaluating real-world performance. Leveraging these resources, we present So-Fake-R1, an advanced vision-language framework that employs reinforcement learning for highly accurate forgery detection, precise localization, and explainable inference through interpretable visual rationales. Extensive experiments show that So-Fake-R1 outperforms the second-best method, with a 1.3% gain in detection accuracy and a 4.5% increase in localization IoU. By integrating a scalable dataset, a challenging OOD benchmark, and an advanced detection framework, this work establishes a new foundation for social media-centric forgery detection research. The code, models, and datasets will be released publicly.
OoDIS: Anomaly Instance Segmentation Benchmark
Autonomous vehicles require a precise understanding of their environment to navigate safely. Reliable identification of unknown objects, especially those that are absent during training, such as wild animals, is critical due to their potential to cause serious accidents. Significant progress in semantic segmentation of anomalies has been driven by the availability of out-of-distribution (OOD) benchmarks. However, a comprehensive understanding of scene dynamics requires the segmentation of individual objects, and thus the segmentation of instances is essential. Development in this area has been lagging, largely due to the lack of dedicated benchmarks. To address this gap, we have extended the most commonly used anomaly segmentation benchmarks to include the instance segmentation task. Our evaluation of anomaly instance segmentation methods shows that this challenge remains an unsolved problem. The benchmark website and the competition page can be found at: https://vision.rwth-aachen.de/oodis .
HYPO: Hyperspherical Out-of-Distribution Generalization
Out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization is critical for machine learning models deployed in the real world. However, achieving this can be fundamentally challenging, as it requires the ability to learn invariant features across different domains or environments. In this paper, we propose a novel framework HYPO (HYPerspherical OOD generalization) that provably learns domain-invariant representations in a hyperspherical space. In particular, our hyperspherical learning algorithm is guided by intra-class variation and inter-class separation principles -- ensuring that features from the same class (across different training domains) are closely aligned with their class prototypes, while different class prototypes are maximally separated. We further provide theoretical justifications on how our prototypical learning objective improves the OOD generalization bound. Through extensive experiments on challenging OOD benchmarks, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms competitive baselines and achieves superior performance. Code is available at https://github.com/deeplearning-wisc/hypo.
RuleReasoner: Reinforced Rule-based Reasoning via Domain-aware Dynamic Sampling
Rule-based reasoning has been acknowledged as one of the fundamental problems in reasoning, while deviations in rule formats, types, and complexity in real-world applications pose severe challenges. Recent studies have shown that large reasoning models (LRMs) have remarkable reasoning capabilities, and their performance is substantially enhanced by reinforcement learning (RL). However, it remains an open question whether small reasoning models (SRMs) can learn rule-based reasoning effectively with robust generalization across diverse tasks and domains. To address this, we introduce Reinforced Rule-based Reasoning, a.k.a. RuleReasoner, a simple yet effective method to conduct rule-based reasoning via a wide collection of curated tasks and a novel domain-aware dynamic sampling approach. Specifically, RuleReasoner resamples each training batch by updating the sampling weights of different domains based on historical rewards. This facilitates domain augmentation and flexible online learning schedules for RL, obviating the need for pre-hoc human-engineered mix-training recipes used in existing methods. Empirical evaluations on in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) benchmarks reveal that RuleReasoner outperforms frontier LRMs by a significant margin (Delta4.1% average points on eight ID tasks and Delta10.4% average points on three OOD tasks over OpenAI-o1). Notably, our approach also exhibits higher computational efficiency compared to prior dynamic sampling methods for RL.
Mixture of Thoughts: Learning to Aggregate What Experts Think, Not Just What They Say
Open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly specialize by domain (e.g., math, code, general reasoning), motivating systems that leverage complementary strengths across models. Prior multi-LLM approaches either (i) route a query to one or a few experts and generate independently, (ii) aggregate outputs from each model via costly multi-turn exchanges, or (iii) fuse weights into a single model-typically requiring architectural homogeneity. We introduce Mixture of Thoughts (MoT), a simple method for latent-level collaboration among heterogeneous experts under a global routing scheme. For each query, a lightweight router selects top-K experts and designates a primary expert; uniformly placed interaction layers project hidden states into a shared latent space where the primary expert performs cross-attention over its active (selected) peers. Pre-trained experts remain frozen; only the router and the lightweight interaction layers are trained with a novel joint training objective that improves both the expert selection and inter-expert collaboration. Across five in-distribution (ID) and three out-of-distribution (OOD) benchmarks, MoT surpasses the current routing and aggregation-based state-of-the-art, Avengers, by +0.38% and +2.92%, respectively. Further, MoT significantly outperforms the best-performing single model. It achieves this with single-pass inference, runtime comparable to routing baselines, and none of the overheads of iterative aggregation. MoT offers a simple latent-space mechanism for combining heterogeneous LLMs, a practical step toward broader multi-LLM collaboration. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/jacobfa/mot.
Learning Non-Linear Invariants for Unsupervised Out-of-Distribution Detection
The inability of deep learning models to handle data drawn from unseen distributions has sparked much interest in unsupervised out-of-distribution (U-OOD) detection, as it is crucial for reliable deep learning models. Despite considerable attention, theoretically-motivated approaches are few and far between, with most methods building on top of some form of heuristic. Recently, U-OOD was formalized in the context of data invariants, allowing a clearer understanding of how to characterize U-OOD, and methods leveraging affine invariants have attained state-of-the-art results on large-scale benchmarks. Nevertheless, the restriction to affine invariants hinders the expressiveness of the approach. In this work, we broaden the affine invariants formulation to a more general case and propose a framework consisting of a normalizing flow-like architecture capable of learning non-linear invariants. Our novel approach achieves state-of-the-art results on an extensive U-OOD benchmark, and we demonstrate its further applicability to tabular data. Finally, we show our method has the same desirable properties as those based on affine invariants.
Understanding Hessian Alignment for Domain Generalization
Out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization is a critical ability for deep learning models in many real-world scenarios including healthcare and autonomous vehicles. Recently, different techniques have been proposed to improve OOD generalization. Among these methods, gradient-based regularizers have shown promising performance compared with other competitors. Despite this success, our understanding of the role of Hessian and gradient alignment in domain generalization is still limited. To address this shortcoming, we analyze the role of the classifier's head Hessian matrix and gradient in domain generalization using recent OOD theory of transferability. Theoretically, we show that spectral norm between the classifier's head Hessian matrices across domains is an upper bound of the transfer measure, a notion of distance between target and source domains. Furthermore, we analyze all the attributes that get aligned when we encourage similarity between Hessians and gradients. Our analysis explains the success of many regularizers like CORAL, IRM, V-REx, Fish, IGA, and Fishr as they regularize part of the classifier's head Hessian and/or gradient. Finally, we propose two simple yet effective methods to match the classifier's head Hessians and gradients in an efficient way, based on the Hessian Gradient Product (HGP) and Hutchinson's method (Hutchinson), and without directly calculating Hessians. We validate the OOD generalization ability of proposed methods in different scenarios, including transferability, severe correlation shift, label shift and diversity shift. Our results show that Hessian alignment methods achieve promising performance on various OOD benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/huawei-noah/Federated-Learning/tree/main/HessianAlignment.
Mitigating Hallucinations in YOLO-based Object Detection Models: A Revisit to Out-of-Distribution Detection
Object detection systems must reliably perceive objects of interest without being overly confident to ensure safe decision-making in dynamic environments. Filtering techniques based on out-of-distribution (OoD) detection are commonly added as an extra safeguard to filter hallucinations caused by overconfidence in novel objects. Nevertheless, evaluating YOLO-family detectors and their filters under existing OoD benchmarks often leads to unsatisfactory performance. This paper studies the underlying reasons for performance bottlenecks and proposes a methodology to improve performance fundamentally. Our first contribution is a calibration of all existing evaluation results: Although images in existing OoD benchmark datasets are claimed not to have objects within in-distribution (ID) classes (i.e., categories defined in the training dataset), around 13% of objects detected by the object detector are actually ID objects. Dually, the ID dataset containing OoD objects can also negatively impact the decision boundary of filters. These ultimately lead to a significantly imprecise performance estimation. Our second contribution is to consider the task of hallucination reduction as a joint pipeline of detectors and filters. By developing a methodology to carefully synthesize an OoD dataset that semantically resembles the objects to be detected, and using the crafted OoD dataset in the fine-tuning of YOLO detectors to suppress the objectness score, we achieve a 88% reduction in overall hallucination error with a combined fine-tuned detection and filtering system on the self-driving benchmark BDD-100K. Our code and dataset are available at: https://gricad-gitlab.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/dnn-safety/m-hood.
LongViTU: Instruction Tuning for Long-Form Video Understanding
This paper introduce LongViTU, a large-scale (~121k QA pairs, ~900h videos), automatically generated dataset for long-form video understanding. We developed a systematic approach that organizes videos into a hierarchical tree structure and incorporates self-revision mechanisms to ensure high-quality QA pairs. Each QA pair in LongViTU features: 1) long-term context (average certificate length of 4.6 minutes); 2) rich knowledge and condensed reasoning (commonsense, causality, planning, etc.); and 3) explicit timestamp labels for relevant events. LongViTU also serves as a benchmark for instruction following in long-form and streaming video understanding. We evaluate the open-source state-of-the-art long video understanding model, LongVU, and the commercial model, Gemini-1.5-Pro, on our benchmark. They achieve GPT-4 scores of 49.9 and 52.3, respectively, underscoring the substantial challenge posed by our benchmark. Further supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on LongVU led to performance improvements of 12.0% on our benchmark, 2.2% on the in-distribution (ID) benchmark EgoSchema, 1.0%, 2.2% and 1.2% on the out-of-distribution (OOD) benchmarks VideoMME (Long), WorldQA and OpenEQA, respectively. These outcomes demonstrate LongViTU's high data quality and robust OOD generalizability.
ELIP: Enhanced Visual-Language Foundation Models for Image Retrieval
The objective in this paper is to improve the performance of text-to-image retrieval. To this end, we introduce a new framework that can boost the performance of large-scale pre-trained vision-language models, so that they can be used for text-to-image re-ranking. The approach, Enhanced Language-Image Pre-training (ELIP), uses the text query, via a simple MLP mapping network, to predict a set of visual prompts to condition the ViT image encoding. ELIP can easily be applied to the commonly used CLIP, SigLIP and BLIP-2 networks. To train the architecture with limited computing resources, we develop a 'student friendly' best practice, involving global hard sample mining, and curation of a large-scale dataset. On the evaluation side, we set up two new out-of-distribution (OOD) benchmarks, Occluded COCO and ImageNet-R, to assess the zero-shot generalisation of the models to different domains. The results demonstrate that ELIP significantly boosts CLIP/SigLIP/SigLIP-2 text-to-image retrieval performance and outperforms BLIP-2 on several benchmarks, as well as providing an easy means to adapt to OOD datasets.
ViM: Out-Of-Distribution with Virtual-logit Matching
Most of the existing Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) detection algorithms depend on single input source: the feature, the logit, or the softmax probability. However, the immense diversity of the OOD examples makes such methods fragile. There are OOD samples that are easy to identify in the feature space while hard to distinguish in the logit space and vice versa. Motivated by this observation, we propose a novel OOD scoring method named Virtual-logit Matching (ViM), which combines the class-agnostic score from feature space and the In-Distribution (ID) class-dependent logits. Specifically, an additional logit representing the virtual OOD class is generated from the residual of the feature against the principal space, and then matched with the original logits by a constant scaling. The probability of this virtual logit after softmax is the indicator of OOD-ness. To facilitate the evaluation of large-scale OOD detection in academia, we create a new OOD dataset for ImageNet-1K, which is human-annotated and is 8.8x the size of existing datasets. We conducted extensive experiments, including CNNs and vision transformers, to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed ViM score. In particular, using the BiT-S model, our method gets an average AUROC 90.91% on four difficult OOD benchmarks, which is 4% ahead of the best baseline. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/haoqiwang/vim.
Generalizable End-to-End Tool-Use RL with Synthetic CodeGym
Tool-augmented large language models (LLMs), hereafter LLM agents, leverage external tools to solve diverse tasks and interface with the real world. However, current training practices largely rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) over static trajectories or reinforcement learning (RL) on narrow tasks, and generalize poorly beyond development settings, leading to brittleness with new tools and unseen workflows. Because code execution reflects many structures of real-world workflows, coding problems provide a natural basis for building agent training environments. Motivated by this, we introduce CodeGym, a scalable framework that synthesizes diverse, verifiable, and controllable multi-turn tool-use environments for agent RL, enabling LLM agents to explore and master various workflows actively. CodeGym rewrites static coding problems into interactive environments by extracting atomic functions or logic into callable tools, yielding verifiable tasks that span various tool-execution workflows. Models of varying sizes and chain-of-thought configurations, trained in CodeGym, exhibit consistent out-of-distribution generalizability; for example, Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct achieves an absolute accuracy gain of 8.7 points on the OOD benchmark tau-Bench. These results highlight CodeGym as a step toward scalable general-purpose RL environments that align with real-world agent workflows.
STELAR-VISION: Self-Topology-Aware Efficient Learning for Aligned Reasoning in Vision
Vision-language models (VLMs) have made significant strides in reasoning, yet they often struggle with complex multimodal tasks and tend to generate overly verbose outputs. A key limitation is their reliance on chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, despite many tasks benefiting from alternative topologies like trees or graphs. To address this, we introduce STELAR-Vision, a training framework for topology-aware reasoning. At its core is TopoAug, a synthetic data pipeline that enriches training with diverse topological structures. Using supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, we post-train Qwen2VL models with both accuracy and efficiency in mind. Additionally, we propose Frugal Learning, which reduces output length with minimal accuracy loss. On MATH-V and VLM-S2H, STELAR-Vision improves accuracy by 9.7% over its base model and surpasses the larger Qwen2VL-72B-Instruct by 7.3%. On five out-of-distribution benchmarks, it outperforms Phi-4-Multimodal-Instruct by up to 28.4% and LLaMA-3.2-11B-Vision-Instruct by up to 13.2%, demonstrating strong generalization. Compared to Chain-Only training, our approach achieves 4.3% higher overall accuracy on in-distribution datasets and consistently outperforms across all OOD benchmarks. We have released datasets, and code will be available.
A Benchmark and Evaluation for Real-World Out-of-Distribution Detection Using Vision-Language Models
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is a task that detects OOD samples during inference to ensure the safety of deployed models. However, conventional benchmarks have reached performance saturation, making it difficult to compare recent OOD detection methods. To address this challenge, we introduce three novel OOD detection benchmarks that enable a deeper understanding of method characteristics and reflect real-world conditions. First, we present ImageNet-X, designed to evaluate performance under challenging semantic shifts. Second, we propose ImageNet-FS-X for full-spectrum OOD detection, assessing robustness to covariate shifts (feature distribution shifts). Finally, we propose Wilds-FS-X, which extends these evaluations to real-world datasets, offering a more comprehensive testbed. Our experiments reveal that recent CLIP-based OOD detection methods struggle to varying degrees across the three proposed benchmarks, and none of them consistently outperforms the others. We hope the community goes beyond specific benchmarks and includes more challenging conditions reflecting real-world scenarios. The code is https://github.com/hoshi23/OOD-X-Benchmarks.
Negative Label Guided OOD Detection with Pretrained Vision-Language Models
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection aims at identifying samples from unknown classes, playing a crucial role in trustworthy models against errors on unexpected inputs. Extensive research has been dedicated to exploring OOD detection in the vision modality. Vision-language models (VLMs) can leverage both textual and visual information for various multi-modal applications, whereas few OOD detection methods take into account information from the text modality. In this paper, we propose a novel post hoc OOD detection method, called NegLabel, which takes a vast number of negative labels from extensive corpus databases. We design a novel scheme for the OOD score collaborated with negative labels. Theoretical analysis helps to understand the mechanism of negative labels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method NegLabel achieves state-of-the-art performance on various OOD detection benchmarks and generalizes well on multiple VLM architectures. Furthermore, our method NegLabel exhibits remarkable robustness against diverse domain shifts. The codes are available at https://github.com/tmlr-group/NegLabel.
ConjNorm: Tractable Density Estimation for Out-of-Distribution Detection
Post-hoc out-of-distribution (OOD) detection has garnered intensive attention in reliable machine learning. Many efforts have been dedicated to deriving score functions based on logits, distances, or rigorous data distribution assumptions to identify low-scoring OOD samples. Nevertheless, these estimate scores may fail to accurately reflect the true data density or impose impractical constraints. To provide a unified perspective on density-based score design, we propose a novel theoretical framework grounded in Bregman divergence, which extends distribution considerations to encompass an exponential family of distributions. Leveraging the conjugation constraint revealed in our theorem, we introduce a ConjNorm method, reframing density function design as a search for the optimal norm coefficient p against the given dataset. In light of the computational challenges of normalization, we devise an unbiased and analytically tractable estimator of the partition function using the Monte Carlo-based importance sampling technique. Extensive experiments across OOD detection benchmarks empirically demonstrate that our proposed ConjNorm has established a new state-of-the-art in a variety of OOD detection setups, outperforming the current best method by up to 13.25% and 28.19% (FPR95) on CIFAR-100 and ImageNet-1K, respectively.
LoCoOp: Few-Shot Out-of-Distribution Detection via Prompt Learning
We present a novel vision-language prompt learning approach for few-shot out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. Few-shot OOD detection aims to detect OOD images from classes that are unseen during training using only a few labeled in-distribution (ID) images. While prompt learning methods such as CoOp have shown effectiveness and efficiency in few-shot ID classification, they still face limitations in OOD detection due to the potential presence of ID-irrelevant information in text embeddings. To address this issue, we introduce a new approach called Local regularized Context Optimization (LoCoOp), which performs OOD regularization that utilizes the portions of CLIP local features as OOD features during training. CLIP's local features have a lot of ID-irrelevant nuisances (e.g., backgrounds), and by learning to push them away from the ID class text embeddings, we can remove the nuisances in the ID class text embeddings and enhance the separation between ID and OOD. Experiments on the large-scale ImageNet OOD detection benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our LoCoOp over zero-shot, fully supervised detection methods and prompt learning methods. Notably, even in a one-shot setting -- just one label per class, LoCoOp outperforms existing zero-shot and fully supervised detection methods. The code will be available via https://github.com/AtsuMiyai/LoCoOp.
Improving Accuracy and Generalization for Efficient Visual Tracking
Efficient visual trackers overfit to their training distributions and lack generalization abilities, resulting in them performing well on their respective in-distribution (ID) test sets and not as well on out-of-distribution (OOD) sequences, imposing limitations to their deployment in-the-wild under constrained resources. We introduce SiamABC, a highly efficient Siamese tracker that significantly improves tracking performance, even on OOD sequences. SiamABC takes advantage of new architectural designs in the way it bridges the dynamic variability of the target, and of new losses for training. Also, it directly addresses OOD tracking generalization by including a fast backward-free dynamic test-time adaptation method that continuously adapts the model according to the dynamic visual changes of the target. Our extensive experiments suggest that SiamABC shows remarkable performance gains in OOD sets while maintaining accurate performance on the ID benchmarks. SiamABC outperforms MixFormerV2-S by 7.6\% on the OOD AVisT benchmark while being 3x faster (100 FPS) on a CPU. Our code and models are available at https://wvuvl.github.io/SiamABC/.
DaGRPO: Rectifying Gradient Conflict in Reasoning via Distinctiveness-Aware Group Relative Policy Optimization
The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) has catalyzed a paradigm shift from superficial instruction following to rigorous long-horizon reasoning. While Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as a pivotal mechanism for eliciting such post-training reasoning capabilities due to its exceptional performance, it remains plagued by significant training instability and poor sample efficiency. We theoretically identify the root cause of these issues as the lack of distinctiveness within on-policy rollouts: for routine queries, highly homogeneous samples induce destructive gradient conflicts; whereas for hard queries, the scarcity of valid positive samples results in ineffective optimization. To bridge this gap, we propose Distinctiveness-aware Group Relative Policy Optimization (DaGRPO). DaGRPO incorporates two core mechanisms: (1) Sequence-level Gradient Rectification, which utilizes fine-grained scoring to dynamically mask sample pairs with low distinctiveness, thereby eradicating gradient conflicts at the source; and (2) Off-policy Data Augmentation, which introduces high-quality anchors to recover training signals for challenging tasks. Extensive experiments across 9 mathematical reasoning and out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization benchmarks demonstrate that DaGRPO significantly surpasses existing SFT, GRPO, and hybrid baselines, achieving new state-of-the-art performance (e.g., a +4.7% average accuracy gain on math benchmarks). Furthermore, in-depth analysis confirms that DaGRPO effectively mitigates gradient explosion and accelerates the emergence of long-chain reasoning capabilities.
Hybrid Energy Based Model in the Feature Space for Out-of-Distribution Detection
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is a critical requirement for the deployment of deep neural networks. This paper introduces the HEAT model, a new post-hoc OOD detection method estimating the density of in-distribution (ID) samples using hybrid energy-based models (EBM) in the feature space of a pre-trained backbone. HEAT complements prior density estimators of the ID density, e.g. parametric models like the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), to provide an accurate yet robust density estimation. A second contribution is to leverage the EBM framework to provide a unified density estimation and to compose several energy terms. Extensive experiments demonstrate the significance of the two contributions. HEAT sets new state-of-the-art OOD detection results on the CIFAR-10 / CIFAR-100 benchmark as well as on the large-scale Imagenet benchmark. The code is available at: https://github.com/MarcLafon/heatood.
DisCoPatch: Taming Adversarially-driven Batch Statistics for Improved Out-of-Distribution Detection
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection holds significant importance across many applications. While semantic and domain-shift OOD problems are well-studied, this work focuses on covariate shifts - subtle variations in the data distribution that can degrade machine learning performance. We hypothesize that detecting these subtle shifts can improve our understanding of in-distribution boundaries, ultimately improving OOD detection. In adversarial discriminators trained with Batch Normalization (BN), real and adversarial samples form distinct domains with unique batch statistics - a property we exploit for OOD detection. We introduce DisCoPatch, an unsupervised Adversarial Variational Autoencoder (VAE) framework that harnesses this mechanism. During inference, batches consist of patches from the same image, ensuring a consistent data distribution that allows the model to rely on batch statistics. DisCoPatch uses the VAE's suboptimal outputs (generated and reconstructed) as negative samples to train the discriminator, thereby improving its ability to delineate the boundary between in-distribution samples and covariate shifts. By tightening this boundary, DisCoPatch achieves state-of-the-art results in public OOD detection benchmarks. The proposed model not only excels in detecting covariate shifts, achieving 95.5% AUROC on ImageNet-1K(-C) but also outperforms all prior methods on public Near-OOD (95.0%) benchmarks. With a compact model size of 25MB, it achieves high OOD detection performance at notably lower latency than existing methods, making it an efficient and practical solution for real-world OOD detection applications. The code is publicly available.
OpenOOD v1.5: Enhanced Benchmark for Out-of-Distribution Detection
Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection is critical for the reliable operation of open-world intelligent systems. Despite the emergence of an increasing number of OOD detection methods, the evaluation inconsistencies present challenges for tracking the progress in this field. OpenOOD v1 initiated the unification of the OOD detection evaluation but faced limitations in scalability and usability. In response, this paper presents OpenOOD v1.5, a significant improvement from its predecessor that ensures accurate, standardized, and user-friendly evaluation of OOD detection methodologies. Notably, OpenOOD v1.5 extends its evaluation capabilities to large-scale datasets such as ImageNet, investigates full-spectrum OOD detection which is important yet underexplored, and introduces new features including an online leaderboard and an easy-to-use evaluator. This work also contributes in-depth analysis and insights derived from comprehensive experimental results, thereby enriching the knowledge pool of OOD detection methodologies. With these enhancements, OpenOOD v1.5 aims to drive advancements and offer a more robust and comprehensive evaluation benchmark for OOD detection research.
UI-R1: Enhancing Action Prediction of GUI Agents by Reinforcement Learning
The recent DeepSeek-R1 has showcased the emergence of reasoning capabilities in LLMs through reinforcement learning (RL) with rule-based rewards. Building on this idea, we are the first to explore how rule-based RL can enhance the reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for graphic user interface (GUI) action prediction tasks. To this end, we curate a small yet high-quality dataset of 136 challenging tasks, encompassing five common action types on mobile devices. We also introduce a unified rule-based action reward, enabling model optimization via policy-based algorithms such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed data-efficient model, UI-R1-3B, achieves substantial improvements on both in-domain (ID) and out-of-domain (OOD) tasks. Specifically, on the ID benchmark AndroidControl, the action type accuracy improves by 15%, while grounding accuracy increases by 10.3%, compared with the base model (i.e. Qwen2.5-VL-3B). On the OOD GUI grounding benchmark ScreenSpot-Pro, our model surpasses the base model by 6.0% and achieves competitive performance with larger models (e.g., OS-Atlas-7B), which are trained via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on 76K data. These results underscore the potential of rule-based reinforcement learning to advance GUI understanding and control, paving the way for future research in this domain.
Are We Done with Object-Centric Learning?
Object-centric learning (OCL) seeks to learn representations that only encode an object, isolated from other objects or background cues in a scene. This approach underpins various aims, including out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, sample-efficient composition, and modeling of structured environments. Most research has focused on developing unsupervised mechanisms that separate objects into discrete slots in the representation space, evaluated using unsupervised object discovery. However, with recent sample-efficient segmentation models, we can separate objects in the pixel space and encode them independently. This achieves remarkable zero-shot performance on OOD object discovery benchmarks, is scalable to foundation models, and can handle a variable number of slots out-of-the-box. Hence, the goal of OCL methods to obtain object-centric representations has been largely achieved. Despite this progress, a key question remains: How does the ability to separate objects within a scene contribute to broader OCL objectives, such as OOD generalization? We address this by investigating the OOD generalization challenge caused by spurious background cues through the lens of OCL. We propose a novel, training-free probe called Object-Centric Classification with Applied Masks (OCCAM), demonstrating that segmentation-based encoding of individual objects significantly outperforms slot-based OCL methods. However, challenges in real-world applications remain. We provide the toolbox for the OCL community to use scalable object-centric representations, and focus on practical applications and fundamental questions, such as understanding object perception in human cognition. Our code is available https://github.com/AlexanderRubinstein/OCCAM{here}.
HAROOD: A Benchmark for Out-of-distribution Generalization in Sensor-based Human Activity Recognition
Sensor-based human activity recognition (HAR) mines activity patterns from the time-series sensory data. In realistic scenarios, variations across individuals, devices, environments, and time introduce significant distributional shifts for the same activities. Recent efforts attempt to solve this challenge by applying or adapting existing out-of-distribution (OOD) algorithms, but only in certain distribution shift scenarios (e.g., cross-device or cross-position), lacking comprehensive insights on the effectiveness of these algorithms. For instance, is OOD necessary to HAR? Which OOD algorithm performs the best? In this paper, we fill this gap by proposing HAROOD, a comprehensive benchmark for HAR in OOD settings. We define 4 OOD scenarios: cross-person, cross-position, cross-dataset, and cross-time, and build a testbed covering 6 datasets, 16 comparative methods (implemented with CNN-based and Transformer-based architectures), and two model selection protocols. Then, we conduct extensive experiments and present several findings for future research, e.g., no single method consistently outperforms others, highlighting substantial opportunity for advancement. Our codebase is highly modular and easy to extend for new datasets, algorithms, comparisons, and analysis, with the hope to facilitate the research in OOD-based HAR. Our implementation is released and can be found at https://github.com/AIFrontierLab/HAROOD.
Can OOD Object Detectors Learn from Foundation Models?
Out-of-distribution (OOD) object detection is a challenging task due to the absence of open-set OOD data. Inspired by recent advancements in text-to-image generative models, such as Stable Diffusion, we study the potential of generative models trained on large-scale open-set data to synthesize OOD samples, thereby enhancing OOD object detection. We introduce SyncOOD, a simple data curation method that capitalizes on the capabilities of large foundation models to automatically extract meaningful OOD data from text-to-image generative models. This offers the model access to open-world knowledge encapsulated within off-the-shelf foundation models. The synthetic OOD samples are then employed to augment the training of a lightweight, plug-and-play OOD detector, thus effectively optimizing the in-distribution (ID)/OOD decision boundaries. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SyncOOD significantly outperforms existing methods, establishing new state-of-the-art performance with minimal synthetic data usage.
MetaCoCo: A New Few-Shot Classification Benchmark with Spurious Correlation
Out-of-distribution (OOD) problems in few-shot classification (FSC) occur when novel classes sampled from testing distributions differ from base classes drawn from training distributions, which considerably degrades the performance of deep learning models deployed in real-world applications. Recent studies suggest that the OOD problems in FSC mainly including: (a) cross-domain few-shot classification (CD-FSC) and (b) spurious-correlation few-shot classification (SC-FSC). Specifically, CD-FSC occurs when a classifier learns transferring knowledge from base classes drawn from seen training distributions but recognizes novel classes sampled from unseen testing distributions. In contrast, SC-FSC arises when a classifier relies on non-causal features (or contexts) that happen to be correlated with the labels (or concepts) in base classes but such relationships no longer hold during the model deployment. Despite CD-FSC has been extensively studied, SC-FSC remains understudied due to lack of the corresponding evaluation benchmarks. To this end, we present Meta Concept Context (MetaCoCo), a benchmark with spurious-correlation shifts collected from real-world scenarios. Moreover, to quantify the extent of spurious-correlation shifts of the presented MetaCoCo, we further propose a metric by using CLIP as a pre-trained vision-language model. Extensive experiments on the proposed benchmark are performed to evaluate the state-of-the-art methods in FSC, cross-domain shifts, and self-supervised learning. The experimental results show that the performance of the existing methods degrades significantly in the presence of spurious-correlation shifts. We open-source all codes of our benchmark and hope that the proposed MetaCoCo can facilitate future research on spurious-correlation shifts problems in FSC. The code is available at: https://github.com/remiMZ/MetaCoCo-ICLR24.
CLIPN for Zero-Shot OOD Detection: Teaching CLIP to Say No
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection refers to training the model on an in-distribution (ID) dataset to classify whether the input images come from unknown classes. Considerable effort has been invested in designing various OOD detection methods based on either convolutional neural networks or transformers. However, zero-shot OOD detection methods driven by CLIP, which only require class names for ID, have received less attention. This paper presents a novel method, namely CLIP saying no (CLIPN), which empowers the logic of saying no within CLIP. Our key motivation is to equip CLIP with the capability of distinguishing OOD and ID samples using positive-semantic prompts and negation-semantic prompts. Specifically, we design a novel learnable no prompt and a no text encoder to capture negation semantics within images. Subsequently, we introduce two loss functions: the image-text binary-opposite loss and the text semantic-opposite loss, which we use to teach CLIPN to associate images with no prompts, thereby enabling it to identify unknown samples. Furthermore, we propose two threshold-free inference algorithms to perform OOD detection by utilizing negation semantics from no prompts and the text encoder. Experimental results on 9 benchmark datasets (3 ID datasets and 6 OOD datasets) for the OOD detection task demonstrate that CLIPN, based on ViT-B-16, outperforms 7 well-used algorithms by at least 2.34% and 11.64% in terms of AUROC and FPR95 for zero-shot OOD detection on ImageNet-1K. Our CLIPN can serve as a solid foundation for effectively leveraging CLIP in downstream OOD tasks. The code is available on https://github.com/xmed-lab/CLIPN.
COOkeD: Ensemble-based OOD detection in the era of zero-shot CLIP
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is an important building block in trustworthy image recognition systems as unknown classes may arise at test-time. OOD detection methods typically revolve around a single classifier, leading to a split in the research field between the classical supervised setting (e.g. ResNet18 classifier trained on CIFAR100) vs. the zero-shot setting (class names fed as prompts to CLIP). In both cases, an overarching challenge is that the OOD detection performance is implicitly constrained by the classifier's capabilities on in-distribution (ID) data. In this work, we show that given a little open-mindedness from both ends, remarkable OOD detection can be achieved by instead creating a heterogeneous ensemble - COOkeD combines the predictions of a closed-world classifier trained end-to-end on a specific dataset, a zero-shot CLIP classifier, and a linear probe classifier trained on CLIP image features. While bulky at first sight, this approach is modular, post-hoc and leverages the availability of pre-trained VLMs, thus introduces little overhead compared to training a single standard classifier. We evaluate COOkeD on popular CIFAR100 and ImageNet benchmarks, but also consider more challenging, realistic settings ranging from training-time label noise, to test-time covariate shift, to zero-shot shift which has been previously overlooked. Despite its simplicity, COOkeD achieves state-of-the-art performance and greater robustness compared to both classical and CLIP-based OOD detection methods. Code is available at https://github.com/glhr/COOkeD
CNS-Bench: Benchmarking Image Classifier Robustness Under Continuous Nuisance Shifts
An important challenge when using computer vision models in the real world is to evaluate their performance in potential out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. While simple synthetic corruptions are commonly applied to test OOD robustness, they often fail to capture nuisance shifts that occur in the real world. Recently, diffusion models have been applied to generate realistic images for benchmarking, but they are restricted to binary nuisance shifts. In this work, we introduce CNS-Bench, a Continuous Nuisance Shift Benchmark to quantify OOD robustness of image classifiers for continuous and realistic generative nuisance shifts. CNS-Bench allows generating a wide range of individual nuisance shifts in continuous severities by applying LoRA adapters to diffusion models. To address failure cases, we propose a filtering mechanism that outperforms previous methods, thereby enabling reliable benchmarking with generative models. With the proposed benchmark, we perform a large-scale study to evaluate the robustness of more than 40 classifiers under various nuisance shifts. Through carefully designed comparisons and analyses, we find that model rankings can change for varying shifts and shift scales, which cannot be captured when applying common binary shifts. Additionally, we show that evaluating the model performance on a continuous scale allows the identification of model failure points, providing a more nuanced understanding of model robustness. Project page including code and data: https://genintel.github.io/CNS.
COCO-O: A Benchmark for Object Detectors under Natural Distribution Shifts
Practical object detection application can lose its effectiveness on image inputs with natural distribution shifts. This problem leads the research community to pay more attention on the robustness of detectors under Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) inputs. Existing works construct datasets to benchmark the detector's OOD robustness for a specific application scenario, e.g., Autonomous Driving. However, these datasets lack universality and are hard to benchmark general detectors built on common tasks such as COCO. To give a more comprehensive robustness assessment, we introduce COCO-O(ut-of-distribution), a test dataset based on COCO with 6 types of natural distribution shifts. COCO-O has a large distribution gap with training data and results in a significant 55.7% relative performance drop on a Faster R-CNN detector. We leverage COCO-O to conduct experiments on more than 100 modern object detectors to investigate if their improvements are credible or just over-fitting to the COCO test set. Unfortunately, most classic detectors in early years do not exhibit strong OOD generalization. We further study the robustness effect on recent breakthroughs of detector's architecture design, augmentation and pre-training techniques. Some empirical findings are revealed: 1) Compared with detection head or neck, backbone is the most important part for robustness; 2) An end-to-end detection transformer design brings no enhancement, and may even reduce robustness; 3) Large-scale foundation models have made a great leap on robust object detection. We hope our COCO-O could provide a rich testbed for robustness study of object detection. The dataset will be available at https://github.com/alibaba/easyrobust/tree/main/benchmarks/coco_o.
Diagnostic Benchmark and Iterative Inpainting for Layout-Guided Image Generation
Spatial control is a core capability in controllable image generation. Advancements in layout-guided image generation have shown promising results on in-distribution (ID) datasets with similar spatial configurations. However, it is unclear how these models perform when facing out-of-distribution (OOD) samples with arbitrary, unseen layouts. In this paper, we propose LayoutBench, a diagnostic benchmark for layout-guided image generation that examines four categories of spatial control skills: number, position, size, and shape. We benchmark two recent representative layout-guided image generation methods and observe that the good ID layout control may not generalize well to arbitrary layouts in the wild (e.g., objects at the boundary). Next, we propose IterInpaint, a new baseline that generates foreground and background regions in a step-by-step manner via inpainting, demonstrating stronger generalizability than existing models on OOD layouts in LayoutBench. We perform quantitative and qualitative evaluation and fine-grained analysis on the four LayoutBench skills to pinpoint the weaknesses of existing models. Lastly, we show comprehensive ablation studies on IterInpaint, including training task ratio, crop&paste vs. repaint, and generation order. Project website: https://layoutbench.github.io
LAVIB: A Large-scale Video Interpolation Benchmark
This paper introduces a LArge-scale Video Interpolation Benchmark (LAVIB) for the low-level video task of Video Frame Interpolation (VFI). LAVIB comprises a large collection of high-resolution videos sourced from the web through an automated pipeline with minimal requirements for human verification. Metrics are computed for each video's motion magnitudes, luminance conditions, frame sharpness, and contrast. The collection of videos and the creation of quantitative challenges based on these metrics are under-explored by current low-level video task datasets. In total, LAVIB includes 283K clips from 17K ultra-HD videos, covering 77.6 hours. Benchmark train, val, and test sets maintain similar video metric distributions. Further splits are also created for out-of-distribution (OOD) challenges, with train and test splits including videos of dissimilar attributes.
Benchmarking Object Detectors under Real-World Distribution Shifts in Satellite Imagery
Object detectors have achieved remarkable performance in many applications; however, these deep learning models are typically designed under the i.i.d. assumption, meaning they are trained and evaluated on data sampled from the same (source) distribution. In real-world deployment, however, target distributions often differ from source data, leading to substantial performance degradation. Domain Generalisation (DG) seeks to bridge this gap by enabling models to generalise to Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) data without access to target distributions during training, enhancing robustness to unseen conditions. In this work, we examine the generalisability and robustness of state-of-the-art object detectors under real-world distribution shifts, focusing particularly on spatial domain shifts. Despite the need, a standardised benchmark dataset specifically designed for assessing object detection under realistic DG scenarios is currently lacking. To address this, we introduce Real-World Distribution Shifts (RWDS), a suite of three novel DG benchmarking datasets that focus on humanitarian and climate change applications. These datasets enable the investigation of domain shifts across (i) climate zones and (ii) various disasters and geographic regions. To our knowledge, these are the first DG benchmarking datasets tailored for object detection in real-world, high-impact contexts. We aim for these datasets to serve as valuable resources for evaluating the robustness and generalisation of future object detection models. Our datasets and code are available at https://github.com/RWGAI/RWDS.
OoD-Bench: Quantifying and Understanding Two Dimensions of Out-of-Distribution Generalization
Deep learning has achieved tremendous success with independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) data. However, the performance of neural networks often degenerates drastically when encountering out-of-distribution (OoD) data, i.e., when training and test data are sampled from different distributions. While a plethora of algorithms have been proposed for OoD generalization, our understanding of the data used to train and evaluate these algorithms remains stagnant. In this work, we first identify and measure two distinct kinds of distribution shifts that are ubiquitous in various datasets. Next, through extensive experiments, we compare OoD generalization algorithms across two groups of benchmarks, each dominated by one of the distribution shifts, revealing their strengths on one shift as well as limitations on the other shift. Overall, we position existing datasets and algorithms from different research areas seemingly unconnected into the same coherent picture. It may serve as a foothold that can be resorted to by future OoD generalization research. Our code is available at https://github.com/ynysjtu/ood_bench.
How Many Unicorns Are in This Image? A Safety Evaluation Benchmark for Vision LLMs
This work focuses on the potential of Vision LLMs (VLLMs) in visual reasoning. Different from prior studies, we shift our focus from evaluating standard performance to introducing a comprehensive safety evaluation suite, covering both out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization and adversarial robustness. For the OOD evaluation, we present two novel VQA datasets, each with one variant, designed to test model performance under challenging conditions. In exploring adversarial robustness, we propose a straightforward attack strategy for misleading VLLMs to produce visual-unrelated responses. Moreover, we assess the efficacy of two jailbreaking strategies, targeting either the vision or language component of VLLMs. Our evaluation of 21 diverse models, ranging from open-source VLLMs to GPT-4V, yields interesting observations: 1) Current VLLMs struggle with OOD texts but not images, unless the visual information is limited; and 2) These VLLMs can be easily misled by deceiving vision encoders only, and their vision-language training often compromise safety protocols. We release this safety evaluation suite at https://github.com/UCSC-VLAA/vllm-safety-benchmark.
Synthesizing Near-Boundary OOD Samples for Out-of-Distribution Detection
Pre-trained vision-language models have exhibited remarkable abilities in detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) samples. However, some challenging OOD samples, which lie close to in-distribution (InD) data in image feature space, can still lead to misclassification. The emergence of foundation models like diffusion models and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) offers a potential solution to this issue. In this work, we propose SynOOD, a novel approach that harnesses foundation models to generate synthetic, challenging OOD data for fine-tuning CLIP models, thereby enhancing boundary-level discrimination between InD and OOD samples. Our method uses an iterative in-painting process guided by contextual prompts from MLLMs to produce nuanced, boundary-aligned OOD samples. These samples are refined through noise adjustments based on gradients from OOD scores like the energy score, effectively sampling from the InD/OOD boundary. With these carefully synthesized images, we fine-tune the CLIP image encoder and negative label features derived from the text encoder to strengthen connections between near-boundary OOD samples and a set of negative labels. Finally, SynOOD achieves state-of-the-art performance on the large-scale ImageNet benchmark, with minimal increases in parameters and runtime. Our approach significantly surpasses existing methods, and the code is available at https://github.com/Jarvisgivemeasuit/SynOOD.
Distilling from Vision-Language Models for Improved OOD Generalization in Vision Tasks
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP are trained on large amounts of image-text pairs, resulting in remarkable generalization across several data distributions. The prohibitively expensive training and data collection/curation costs of these models make them valuable Intellectual Property (IP) for organizations. This motivates a vendor-client paradigm, where a vendor trains a large-scale VLM and grants only input-output access to clients on a pay-per-query basis in a black-box setting. The client aims to minimize inference cost by distilling the VLM to a student model using the limited available task-specific data, and further deploying this student model in the downstream application. While naive distillation largely improves the In-Domain (ID) accuracy of the student, it fails to transfer the superior out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization of the VLM teacher using the limited available labeled images. To mitigate this, we propose Vision-Language to Vision-Align, Distill, Predict (VL2V-ADiP), which first aligns the vision and language modalities of the teacher model with the vision modality of a pre-trained student model, and further distills the aligned VLM embeddings to the student. This maximally retains the pre-trained features of the student, while also incorporating the rich representations of the VLM image encoder and the superior generalization of the text embeddings. The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art results on the standard Domain Generalization benchmarks in a black-box teacher setting, and also when weights of the VLM are accessible.
BEIR: A Heterogenous Benchmark for Zero-shot Evaluation of Information Retrieval Models
Existing neural information retrieval (IR) models have often been studied in homogeneous and narrow settings, which has considerably limited insights into their out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization capabilities. To address this, and to facilitate researchers to broadly evaluate the effectiveness of their models, we introduce Benchmarking-IR (BEIR), a robust and heterogeneous evaluation benchmark for information retrieval. We leverage a careful selection of 18 publicly available datasets from diverse text retrieval tasks and domains and evaluate 10 state-of-the-art retrieval systems including lexical, sparse, dense, late-interaction and re-ranking architectures on the BEIR benchmark. Our results show BM25 is a robust baseline and re-ranking and late-interaction-based models on average achieve the best zero-shot performances, however, at high computational costs. In contrast, dense and sparse-retrieval models are computationally more efficient but often underperform other approaches, highlighting the considerable room for improvement in their generalization capabilities. We hope this framework allows us to better evaluate and understand existing retrieval systems, and contributes to accelerating progress towards better robust and generalizable systems in the future. BEIR is publicly available at https://github.com/UKPLab/beir.
AdaSCALE: Adaptive Scaling for OOD Detection
The ability of the deep learning model to recognize when a sample falls outside its learned distribution is critical for safe and reliable deployment. Recent state-of-the-art out-of-distribution (OOD) detection methods leverage activation shaping to improve the separation between in-distribution (ID) and OOD inputs. These approaches resort to sample-specific scaling but apply a static percentile threshold across all samples regardless of their nature, resulting in suboptimal ID-OOD separability. In this work, we propose AdaSCALE, an adaptive scaling procedure that dynamically adjusts the percentile threshold based on a sample's estimated OOD likelihood. This estimation leverages our key observation: OOD samples exhibit significantly more pronounced activation shifts at high-magnitude activations under minor perturbation compared to ID samples. AdaSCALE enables stronger scaling for likely ID samples and weaker scaling for likely OOD samples, yielding highly separable energy scores. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art OOD detection performance, outperforming the latest rival OptFS by 14.94 in near-OOD and 21.67 in far-OOD datasets in average FPR@95 metric on the ImageNet-1k benchmark across eight diverse architectures. The code is available at: https://github.com/sudarshanregmi/AdaSCALE/
Evaluating Self-Supervised Learning in Medical Imaging: A Benchmark for Robustness, Generalizability, and Multi-Domain Impact
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a promising paradigm in medical imaging, addressing the chronic challenge of limited labeled data in healthcare settings. While SSL has shown impressive results, existing studies in the medical domain are often limited in scope, focusing on specific datasets or modalities, or evaluating only isolated aspects of model performance. This fragmented evaluation approach poses a significant challenge, as models deployed in critical medical settings must not only achieve high accuracy but also demonstrate robust performance and generalizability across diverse datasets and varying conditions. To address this gap, we present a comprehensive evaluation of SSL methods within the medical domain, with a particular focus on robustness and generalizability. Using the MedMNIST dataset collection as a standardized benchmark, we evaluate 8 major SSL methods across 11 different medical datasets. Our study provides an in-depth analysis of model performance in both in-domain scenarios and the detection of out-of-distribution (OOD) samples, while exploring the effect of various initialization strategies, model architectures, and multi-domain pre-training. We further assess the generalizability of SSL methods through cross-dataset evaluations and the in-domain performance with varying label proportions (1%, 10%, and 100%) to simulate real-world scenarios with limited supervision. We hope this comprehensive benchmark helps practitioners and researchers make more informed decisions when applying SSL methods to medical applications.
UMAD: University of Macau Anomaly Detection Benchmark Dataset
Anomaly detection is critical in surveillance systems and patrol robots by identifying anomalous regions in images for early warning. Depending on whether reference data are utilized, anomaly detection can be categorized into anomaly detection with reference and anomaly detection without reference. Currently, anomaly detection without reference, which is closely related to out-of-distribution (OoD) object detection, struggles with learning anomalous patterns due to the difficulty of collecting sufficiently large and diverse anomaly datasets with the inherent rarity and novelty of anomalies. Alternatively, anomaly detection with reference employs the scheme of change detection to identify anomalies by comparing semantic changes between a reference image and a query one. However, there are very few ADr works due to the scarcity of public datasets in this domain. In this paper, we aim to address this gap by introducing the UMAD Benchmark Dataset. To our best knowledge, this is the first benchmark dataset designed specifically for anomaly detection with reference in robotic patrolling scenarios, e.g., where an autonomous robot is employed to detect anomalous objects by comparing a reference and a query video sequences. The reference sequences can be taken by the robot along a specified route when there are no anomalous objects in the scene. The query sequences are captured online by the robot when it is patrolling in the same scene following the same route. Our benchmark dataset is elaborated such that each query image can find a corresponding reference based on accurate robot localization along the same route in the prebuilt 3D map, with which the reference and query images can be geometrically aligned using adaptive warping. Besides the proposed benchmark dataset, we evaluate the baseline models of ADr on this dataset.
LibriVAD: A Scalable Open Dataset with Deep Learning Benchmarks for Voice Activity Detection
Robust Voice Activity Detection (VAD) remains a challenging task, especially under noisy, diverse, and unseen acoustic conditions. Beyond algorithmic development, a key limitation in advancing VAD research is the lack of large-scale, systematically controlled, and publicly available datasets. To address this, we introduce LibriVAD - a scalable open-source dataset derived from LibriSpeech and augmented with diverse real-world and synthetic noise sources. LibriVAD enables systematic control over speech-to-noise ratio, silence-to-speech ratio (SSR), and noise diversity, and is released in three sizes (15 GB, 150 GB, and 1.5 TB) with two variants (LibriVAD-NonConcat and LibriVAD-Concat) to support different experimental setups. We benchmark multiple feature-model combinations, including waveform, Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC), and Gammatone filter bank cepstral coefficients, and introduce the Vision Transformer (ViT) architecture for VAD. Our experiments show that ViT with MFCC features consistently outperforms established VAD models such as boosted deep neural network and convolutional long short-term memory deep neural network across seen, unseen, and out-of-distribution (OOD) conditions, including evaluation on the real-world VOiCES dataset. We further analyze the impact of dataset size and SSR on model generalization, experimentally showing that scaling up dataset size and balancing SSR noticeably and consistently enhance VAD performance under OOD conditions. All datasets, trained models, and code are publicly released to foster reproducibility and accelerate progress in VAD research.
The Quest for Efficient Reasoning: A Data-Centric Benchmark to CoT Distillation
Data-centric distillation, including data augmentation, selection, and mixing, offers a promising path to creating smaller, more efficient student Large Language Models (LLMs) that retain strong reasoning abilities. However, there still lacks a comprehensive benchmark to systematically assess the effect of each distillation approach. This paper introduces DC-CoT, the first data-centric benchmark that investigates data manipulation in chain-of-thought (CoT) distillation from method, model and data perspectives. Utilizing various teacher models (e.g., o4-mini, Gemini-Pro, Claude-3.5) and student architectures (e.g., 3B, 7B parameters), we rigorously evaluate the impact of these data manipulations on student model performance across multiple reasoning datasets, with a focus on in-distribution (IID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, and cross-domain transfer. Our findings aim to provide actionable insights and establish best practices for optimizing CoT distillation through data-centric techniques, ultimately facilitating the development of more accessible and capable reasoning models. The dataset can be found at https://huggingface.co/datasets/rana-shahroz/DC-COT, while our code is shared in https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DC-COT-FF4C/.
Diversifying Deep Ensembles: A Saliency Map Approach for Enhanced OOD Detection, Calibration, and Accuracy
Deep ensembles are capable of achieving state-of-the-art results in classification and out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. However, their effectiveness is limited due to the homogeneity of learned patterns within ensembles. To overcome this issue, our study introduces Saliency Diversified Deep Ensemble (SDDE), a novel approach that promotes diversity among ensemble members by leveraging saliency maps. Through incorporating saliency map diversification, our method outperforms conventional ensemble techniques and improves calibration in multiple classification and OOD detection tasks. In particular, the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art OOD detection quality, calibration, and accuracy on multiple benchmarks, including CIFAR10/100 and large-scale ImageNet datasets.
OOP: Object-Oriented Programming Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models
Advancing automated programming necessitates robust and comprehensive code generation benchmarks, yet current evaluation frameworks largely neglect object-oriented programming (OOP) in favor of functional programming (FP), e.g., HumanEval and MBPP. To address this, our study introduces a pioneering OOP-focused benchmark, featuring 431 Python programs that encompass essential OOP concepts and features like classes and encapsulation methods. We propose a novel evaluation metric, pass@o, tailored for OOP, enhancing traditional pass@k measures. Our evaluation of 23 leading large language models (LLMs), including both general and code-specialized models, reveals three key insights: 1) pass@o offers a more relevant and comprehensive assessment for OOP code generation; 2) Despite excelling in FP, code-specialized LLMs like WizardCoder lag in OOP compared to models like ChatGPT; 3) The poor performance of all advanced LLMs on our OOP benchmark highlights a critical need for improvements in this field. Our benchmark and scripts are publicly released at: https://github.com/alphadl/OOP-eval.
GLUE-X: Evaluating Natural Language Understanding Models from an Out-of-distribution Generalization Perspective
Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are known to improve the generalization performance of natural language understanding models by leveraging large amounts of data during the pre-training phase. However, the out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization problem remains a challenge in many NLP tasks, limiting the real-world deployment of these methods. This paper presents the first attempt at creating a unified benchmark named GLUE-X for evaluating OOD robustness in NLP models, highlighting the importance of OOD robustness and providing insights on how to measure the robustness of a model and how to improve it. The benchmark includes 13 publicly available datasets for OOD testing, and evaluations are conducted on 8 classic NLP tasks over 21 popularly used PLMs, including GPT-3 and GPT-3.5. Our findings confirm the need for improved OOD accuracy in NLP tasks, as significant performance degradation was observed in all settings compared to in-distribution (ID) accuracy.
Towards Principled Disentanglement for Domain Generalization
A fundamental challenge for machine learning models is generalizing to out-of-distribution (OOD) data, in part due to spurious correlations. To tackle this challenge, we first formalize the OOD generalization problem as constrained optimization, called Disentanglement-constrained Domain Generalization (DDG). We relax this non-trivial constrained optimization problem to a tractable form with finite-dimensional parameterization and empirical approximation. Then a theoretical analysis of the extent to which the above transformations deviates from the original problem is provided. Based on the transformation, we propose a primal-dual algorithm for joint representation disentanglement and domain generalization. In contrast to traditional approaches based on domain adversarial training and domain labels, DDG jointly learns semantic and variation encoders for disentanglement, enabling flexible manipulation and augmentation on training data. DDG aims to learn intrinsic representations of semantic concepts that are invariant to nuisance factors and generalizable across domains. Comprehensive experiments on popular benchmarks show that DDG can achieve competitive OOD performance and uncover interpretable salient structures within data.
What is Essential for Unseen Goal Generalization of Offline Goal-conditioned RL?
Offline goal-conditioned RL (GCRL) offers a way to train general-purpose agents from fully offline datasets. In addition to being conservative within the dataset, the generalization ability to achieve unseen goals is another fundamental challenge for offline GCRL. However, to the best of our knowledge, this problem has not been well studied yet. In this paper, we study out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization of offline GCRL both theoretically and empirically to identify factors that are important. In a number of experiments, we observe that weighted imitation learning enjoys better generalization than pessimism-based offline RL method. Based on this insight, we derive a theory for OOD generalization, which characterizes several important design choices. We then propose a new offline GCRL method, Generalizable Offline goAl-condiTioned RL (GOAT), by combining the findings from our theoretical and empirical studies. On a new benchmark containing 9 independent identically distributed (IID) tasks and 17 OOD tasks, GOAT outperforms current state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.
SAFE: Sensitivity-Aware Features for Out-of-Distribution Object Detection
We address the problem of out-of-distribution (OOD) detection for the task of object detection. We show that residual convolutional layers with batch normalisation produce Sensitivity-Aware FEatures (SAFE) that are consistently powerful for distinguishing in-distribution from out-of-distribution detections. We extract SAFE vectors for every detected object, and train a multilayer perceptron on the surrogate task of distinguishing adversarially perturbed from clean in-distribution examples. This circumvents the need for realistic OOD training data, computationally expensive generative models, or retraining of the base object detector. SAFE outperforms the state-of-the-art OOD object detectors on multiple benchmarks by large margins, e.g. reducing the FPR95 by an absolute 30.6% from 48.3% to 17.7% on the OpenImages dataset.
SAFT: Towards Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Fine-Tuning
Handling distribution shifts from training data, known as out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, poses a significant challenge in the field of machine learning. While a pre-trained vision-language model like CLIP has demonstrated remarkable zero-shot performance, further adaptation of the model to downstream tasks leads to undesirable degradation for OOD data. In this work, we introduce Sparse Adaptation for Fine-Tuning (SAFT), a method that prevents fine-tuning from forgetting the general knowledge in the pre-trained model. SAFT only updates a small subset of important parameters whose gradient magnitude is large, while keeping the other parameters frozen. SAFT is straightforward to implement and conceptually simple. Extensive experiments show that with only 0.1% of the model parameters, SAFT can significantly improve the performance of CLIP. It consistently outperforms baseline methods across several benchmarks. On the few-shot learning benchmark of ImageNet and its variants, SAFT gives a gain of 5.15% on average over the conventional fine-tuning method in OOD settings.
On the generalization capacity of neural networks during generic multimodal reasoning
The advent of the Transformer has led to the development of large language models (LLM), which appear to demonstrate human-like capabilities. To assess the generality of this class of models and a variety of other base neural network architectures to multimodal domains, we evaluated and compared their capacity for multimodal generalization. We introduce a multimodal question-answer benchmark to evaluate three specific types of out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization performance: distractor generalization (generalization in the presence of distractors), systematic compositional generalization (generalization to new task permutations), and productive compositional generalization (generalization to more complex tasks structures). We found that across model architectures (e.g., RNNs, Transformers, Perceivers, etc.), models with multiple attention layers, or models that leveraged cross-attention mechanisms between input domains, fared better. Our positive results demonstrate that for multimodal distractor and systematic generalization, either cross-modal attention or models with deeper attention layers are key architectural features required to integrate multimodal inputs. On the other hand, neither of these architectural features led to productive generalization, suggesting fundamental limitations of existing architectures for specific types of multimodal generalization. These results demonstrate the strengths and limitations of specific architectural components underlying modern neural models for multimodal reasoning. Finally, we provide Generic COG (gCOG), a configurable benchmark with several multimodal generalization splits, for future studies to explore.
A Closer Look at GAN Priors: Exploiting Intermediate Features for Enhanced Model Inversion Attacks
Model Inversion (MI) attacks aim to reconstruct privacy-sensitive training data from released models by utilizing output information, raising extensive concerns about the security of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Recent advances in generative adversarial networks (GANs) have contributed significantly to the improved performance of MI attacks due to their powerful ability to generate realistic images with high fidelity and appropriate semantics. However, previous MI attacks have solely disclosed private information in the latent space of GAN priors, limiting their semantic extraction and transferability across multiple target models and datasets. To address this challenge, we propose a novel method, Intermediate Features enhanced Generative Model Inversion (IF-GMI), which disassembles the GAN structure and exploits features between intermediate blocks. This allows us to extend the optimization space from latent code to intermediate features with enhanced expressive capabilities. To prevent GAN priors from generating unrealistic images, we apply a L1 ball constraint to the optimization process. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms previous approaches and achieves state-of-the-art results under various settings, especially in the out-of-distribution (OOD) scenario. Our code is available at: https://github.com/final-solution/IF-GMI
Generalize or Detect? Towards Robust Semantic Segmentation Under Multiple Distribution Shifts
In open-world scenarios, where both novel classes and domains may exist, an ideal segmentation model should detect anomaly classes for safety and generalize to new domains. However, existing methods often struggle to distinguish between domain-level and semantic-level distribution shifts, leading to poor out-of-distribution (OOD) detection or domain generalization performance. In this work, we aim to equip the model to generalize effectively to covariate-shift regions while precisely identifying semantic-shift regions. To achieve this, we design a novel generative augmentation method to produce coherent images that incorporate both anomaly (or novel) objects and various covariate shifts at both image and object levels. Furthermore, we introduce a training strategy that recalibrates uncertainty specifically for semantic shifts and enhances the feature extractor to align features associated with domain shifts. We validate the effectiveness of our method across benchmarks featuring both semantic and domain shifts. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across all benchmarks for both OOD detection and domain generalization. Code is available at https://github.com/gaozhitong/MultiShiftSeg.
Bridging Reasoning to Learning: Unmasking Illusions using Complexity Out of Distribution Generalization
Recent progress has pushed AI frontiers from pattern recognition tasks toward problems that require step by step, System2 style reasoning, especially with large language models. Yet, unlike learning, where generalization and out of distribution (OoD) evaluation concepts are well formalized, there is no clear, consistent definition or metric for reasoning ability. We propose Complexity Out of Distribution (Complexity OoD) generalization as a framework and problem setting to define and measure reasoning. A model exhibits Complexity OoD generalization when it maintains performance on test instances whose minimal required solution complexity, either representational (richer solution structure) or computational (more reasoning steps/program length), exceeds that of all training examples. We formalize complexity via solution description Kolmogorov complexity and operational proxies (e.g., object/relation counts; reasoning step counts), clarifying how Complexity OoD differs from length and compositional OoD. This lens unifies learning and reasoning: many cases solvable with System1 like processing at low complexity become System2 like under complexity pressure, while System2 can be viewed as generalization over solution structures. We translate this perspective into practice with recommendations for operationalizing Complexity OoD across the stack: incorporating complexity into benchmark and evaluation metric design, rethinking supervision to target solution traces, seeking and designing inductive biases for Complexity OoD generalization, addressing learning to reason spillovers such as spurious shortcuts, semantic robustness, catastrophic forgetting, and step wise calibration. Because Complexity OoD cannot be solved by scaling data alone, progress toward robust reasoning will require architectures and training regimes that explicitly model and allocate computation with respect to complexity.
Efficient Model Adaptation for Continual Learning at the Edge
Most machine learning (ML) systems assume stationary and matching data distributions during training and deployment. This is often a false assumption. When ML models are deployed on real devices, data distributions often shift over time due to changes in environmental factors, sensor characteristics, and task-of-interest. While it is possible to have a human-in-the-loop to monitor for distribution shifts and engineer new architectures in response to these shifts, such a setup is not cost-effective. Instead, non-stationary automated ML (AutoML) models are needed. This paper presents the Encoder-Adaptor-Reconfigurator (EAR) framework for efficient continual learning under domain shifts. The EAR framework uses a fixed deep neural network (DNN) feature encoder and trains shallow networks on top of the encoder to handle novel data. The EAR framework is capable of 1) detecting when new data is out-of-distribution (OOD) by combining DNNs with hyperdimensional computing (HDC), 2) identifying low-parameter neural adaptors to adapt the model to the OOD data using zero-shot neural architecture search (ZS-NAS), and 3) minimizing catastrophic forgetting on previous tasks by progressively growing the neural architecture as needed and dynamically routing data through the appropriate adaptors and reconfigurators for handling domain-incremental and class-incremental continual learning. We systematically evaluate our approach on several benchmark datasets for domain adaptation and demonstrate strong performance compared to state-of-the-art algorithms for OOD detection and few-/zero-shot NAS.
ICL-D3IE: In-Context Learning with Diverse Demonstrations Updating for Document Information Extraction
Large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-3 and ChatGPT, have demonstrated remarkable results in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks with in-context learning, which involves inference based on a few demonstration examples. Despite their successes in NLP tasks, no investigation has been conducted to assess the ability of LLMs to perform document information extraction (DIE) using in-context learning. Applying LLMs to DIE poses two challenges: the modality and task gap. To this end, we propose a simple but effective in-context learning framework called ICL-D3IE, which enables LLMs to perform DIE with different types of demonstration examples. Specifically, we extract the most difficult and distinct segments from hard training documents as hard demonstrations for benefiting all test instances. We design demonstrations describing relationships that enable LLMs to understand positional relationships. We introduce formatting demonstrations for easy answer extraction. Additionally, the framework improves diverse demonstrations by updating them iteratively. Our experiments on three widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate that the ICL-D3IE framework enables Davinci-003/ChatGPT to achieve superior performance when compared to previous pre-trained methods fine-tuned with full training in both the in-distribution (ID) setting and in the out-of-distribution (OOD) setting. Code is available at https://github.com/MAEHCM/ICL-D3IE.
TagOOD: A Novel Approach to Out-of-Distribution Detection via Vision-Language Representations and Class Center Learning
Multimodal fusion, leveraging data like vision and language, is rapidly gaining traction. This enriched data representation improves performance across various tasks. Existing methods for out-of-distribution (OOD) detection, a critical area where AI models encounter unseen data in real-world scenarios, rely heavily on whole-image features. These image-level features can include irrelevant information that hinders the detection of OOD samples, ultimately limiting overall performance. In this paper, we propose TagOOD, a novel approach for OOD detection that leverages vision-language representations to achieve label-free object feature decoupling from whole images. This decomposition enables a more focused analysis of object semantics, enhancing OOD detection performance. Subsequently, TagOOD trains a lightweight network on the extracted object features to learn representative class centers. These centers capture the central tendencies of IND object classes, minimizing the influence of irrelevant image features during OOD detection. Finally, our approach efficiently detects OOD samples by calculating distance-based metrics as OOD scores between learned centers and test samples. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate TagOOD on several benchmark datasets and demonstrate its superior performance compared to existing OOD detection methods. This work presents a novel perspective for further exploration of multimodal information utilization in OOD detection, with potential applications across various tasks.
LEAML: Label-Efficient Adaptation to Out-of-Distribution Visual Tasks for Multimodal Large Language Models
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved strong performance on general visual benchmarks but struggle with out-of-distribution (OOD) tasks in specialized domains such as medical imaging, where labeled data is limited and expensive. We introduce LEAML, a label-efficient adaptation framework that leverages both scarce labeled VQA samples and abundant unlabeled images. Our approach generates domain-relevant pseudo question-answer pairs for unlabeled data using a QA generator regularized by caption distillation. Importantly, we selectively update only those neurons most relevant to question-answering, enabling the QA Generator to efficiently acquire domain-specific knowledge during distillation. Experiments on gastrointestinal endoscopy and sports VQA demonstrate that LEAML consistently outperforms standard fine-tuning under minimal supervision, highlighting the effectiveness of our proposed LEAML framework.
Concise and Organized Perception Facilitates Large Language Models for Deductive Reasoning
Exploiting large language models (LLMs) to tackle deductive reasoning has garnered growing attention. It still remains highly challenging to achieve satisfactory results in complex deductive problems, characterized by plenty of premises (i.e., facts or rules) entailing intricate relationships among entities and requiring multi-hop reasoning. One intuitive solution is to decompose the original task into smaller sub-tasks, and then chain the multiple casual reasoning steps together in a forward (e.g., Selection-Inference) or backward (e.g., LAMBADA) direction. However, these techniques inevitably necessitate a large number of overall stages, leading to computationally expensive operations and a higher possibility of making misleading steps. In addition to stage-by-stage decomposition, we draw inspiration from another aspect of human problem-solving. Humans tend to distill the most relevant information and organize their thoughts systematically (e.g., creating mind maps), which assists them in answering questions or drawing conclusions precisely and quickly. In light of this, we propose a novel reasoning approach named Concise and Organized Perception (COP). COP carefully analyzes the given statements to efficiently identify the most pertinent information while eliminating redundancy. It then prompts the LLMs in a more organized form that adapts to the model's inference process. By perceiving concise and organized proofs, the deductive reasoning abilities of LLMs can be better elicited, and the risk of acquiring errors caused by excessive reasoning stages is mitigated. Furthermore, our approach can be combined with the aforementioned ones to further boost their performance. Extensive experimental results on three popular deductive benchmarks (i.e., ProofWriter, PrOntoQA and PrOntoQA-OOD) show that COP significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.
Scaling for Training Time and Post-hoc Out-of-distribution Detection Enhancement
The capacity of a modern deep learning system to determine if a sample falls within its realm of knowledge is fundamental and important. In this paper, we offer insights and analyses of recent state-of-the-art out-of-distribution (OOD) detection methods - extremely simple activation shaping (ASH). We demonstrate that activation pruning has a detrimental effect on OOD detection, while activation scaling enhances it. Moreover, we propose SCALE, a simple yet effective post-hoc network enhancement method for OOD detection, which attains state-of-the-art OOD detection performance without compromising in-distribution (ID) accuracy. By integrating scaling concepts into the training process to capture a sample's ID characteristics, we propose Intermediate Tensor SHaping (ISH), a lightweight method for training time OOD detection enhancement. We achieve AUROC scores of +1.85\% for near-OOD and +0.74\% for far-OOD datasets on the OpenOOD v1.5 ImageNet-1K benchmark. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/kai422/SCALE.
Rich Feature Construction for the Optimization-Generalization Dilemma
There often is a dilemma between ease of optimization and robust out-of-distribution (OoD) generalization. For instance, many OoD methods rely on penalty terms whose optimization is challenging. They are either too strong to optimize reliably or too weak to achieve their goals. We propose to initialize the networks with a rich representation containing a palette of potentially useful features, ready to be used by even simple models. On the one hand, a rich representation provides a good initialization for the optimizer. On the other hand, it also provides an inductive bias that helps OoD generalization. Such a representation is constructed with the Rich Feature Construction (RFC) algorithm, also called the Bonsai algorithm, which consists of a succession of training episodes. During discovery episodes, we craft a multi-objective optimization criterion and its associated datasets in a manner that prevents the network from using the features constructed in the previous iterations. During synthesis episodes, we use knowledge distillation to force the network to simultaneously represent all the previously discovered features. Initializing the networks with Bonsai representations consistently helps six OoD methods achieve top performance on ColoredMNIST benchmark. The same technique substantially outperforms comparable results on the Wilds Camelyon17 task, eliminates the high result variance that plagues other methods, and makes hyperparameter tuning and model selection more reliable.
Listener-Rewarded Thinking in VLMs for Image Preferences
Training robust and generalizable reward models for human visual preferences is essential for aligning text-to-image and text-to-video generative models with human intent. However, current reward models often fail to generalize, and supervised fine-tuning leads to memorization, demanding complex annotation pipelines. While reinforcement learning (RL), specifically Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), improves generalization, we uncover a key failure mode: a significant drop in reasoning accuracy occurs when a model's reasoning trace contradicts that of an independent, frozen vision-language model ("listener") evaluating the same output. To address this, we introduce a listener-augmented GRPO framework. Here, the listener re-evaluates the reasoner's chain-of-thought to provide a dense, calibrated confidence score, shaping the RL reward signal. This encourages the reasoner not only to answer correctly, but to produce explanations that are persuasive to an independent model. Our listener-shaped reward scheme achieves best accuracy on the ImageReward benchmark (67.4%), significantly improves out-of-distribution (OOD) performance on a large-scale human preference dataset (1.2M votes, up to +6% over naive reasoner), and reduces reasoning contradictions compared to strong GRPO and SFT baselines. These results demonstrate that listener-based rewards provide a scalable, data-efficient path to aligning vision-language models with nuanced human preferences. We will release our reasoning model here: https://huggingface.co/alexgambashidze/qwen2.5vl_image_preference_reasoner.
TrustGeoGen: Scalable and Formal-Verified Data Engine for Trustworthy Multi-modal Geometric Problem Solving
Mathematical geometric problem solving (GPS) often requires effective integration of multimodal information and verifiable logical coherence. Despite the fast development of large language models in general problem solving, it remains unresolved regarding with both methodology and benchmarks, especially given the fact that exiting synthetic GPS benchmarks are often not self-verified and contain noise and self-contradicted information due to the illusion of LLMs. In this paper, we propose a scalable data engine called TrustGeoGen for problem generation, with formal verification to provide a principled benchmark, which we believe lays the foundation for the further development of methods for GPS. The engine synthesizes geometric data through four key innovations: 1) multimodal-aligned generation of diagrams, textual descriptions, and stepwise solutions; 2) formal verification ensuring rule-compliant reasoning paths; 3) a bootstrapping mechanism enabling complexity escalation via recursive state generation and 4) our devised GeoExplore series algorithms simultaneously produce multi-solution variants and self-reflective backtracking traces. By formal logical verification, TrustGeoGen produces GeoTrust-200K dataset with guaranteed modality integrity, along with GeoTrust-test testset. Experiments reveal the state-of-the-art models achieve only 49.17\% accuracy on GeoTrust-test, demonstrating its evaluation stringency. Crucially, models trained on GeoTrust achieve OOD generalization on GeoQA, significantly reducing logical inconsistencies relative to pseudo-label annotated by OpenAI-o1. Our code is available at https://github.com/Alpha-Innovator/TrustGeoGen
CAT: Causal Attention Tuning For Injecting Fine-grained Causal Knowledge into Large Language Models
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across various domains. However, a fundamental question remains: Can LLMs effectively utilize causal knowledge for prediction and generation? Through empirical studies, we find that LLMs trained directly on large-scale data often capture spurious correlations rather than true causal relationships, leading to suboptimal performance, especially in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose Causal Attention Tuning (CAT), a novel approach that injects fine-grained causal knowledge into the attention mechanism. We propose an automated pipeline that leverages human priors to automatically generate token-level causal signals and introduce the Re-Attention mechanism to guide training, helping the model focus on causal structures while mitigating noise and biases in attention scores. Experimental results on our proposed Spurious Token Game (STG) benchmark and multiple downstream tasks demonstrate that our approach effectively leverages causal knowledge for prediction and remains robust in OOD scenarios. Implementation details can be found at https://github.com/Kairong-Han/CAT.
MultiOOD: Scaling Out-of-Distribution Detection for Multiple Modalities
Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) samples is important for deploying machine learning models in safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving and robot-assisted surgery. Existing research has mainly focused on unimodal scenarios on image data. However, real-world applications are inherently multimodal, which makes it essential to leverage information from multiple modalities to enhance the efficacy of OOD detection. To establish a foundation for more realistic Multimodal OOD Detection, we introduce the first-of-its-kind benchmark, MultiOOD, characterized by diverse dataset sizes and varying modality combinations. We first evaluate existing unimodal OOD detection algorithms on MultiOOD, observing that the mere inclusion of additional modalities yields substantial improvements. This underscores the importance of utilizing multiple modalities for OOD detection. Based on the observation of Modality Prediction Discrepancy between in-distribution (ID) and OOD data, and its strong correlation with OOD performance, we propose the Agree-to-Disagree (A2D) algorithm to encourage such discrepancy during training. Moreover, we introduce a novel outlier synthesis method, NP-Mix, which explores broader feature spaces by leveraging the information from nearest neighbor classes and complements A2D to strengthen OOD detection performance. Extensive experiments on MultiOOD demonstrate that training with A2D and NP-Mix improves existing OOD detection algorithms by a large margin. Our source code and MultiOOD benchmark are available at https://github.com/donghao51/MultiOOD.
Neural Algorithmic Reasoning with Causal Regularisation
Recent work on neural algorithmic reasoning has investigated the reasoning capabilities of neural networks, effectively demonstrating they can learn to execute classical algorithms on unseen data coming from the train distribution. However, the performance of existing neural reasoners significantly degrades on out-of-distribution (OOD) test data, where inputs have larger sizes. In this work, we make an important observation: there are many different inputs for which an algorithm will perform certain intermediate computations identically. This insight allows us to develop data augmentation procedures that, given an algorithm's intermediate trajectory, produce inputs for which the target algorithm would have exactly the same next trajectory step. Then, we employ a causal framework to design a corresponding self-supervised objective, and we prove that it improves the OOD generalisation capabilities of the reasoner. We evaluate our method on the CLRS algorithmic reasoning benchmark, where we show up to 3times improvements on the OOD test data.
"Don't Teach Minerva": Guiding LLMs Through Complex Syntax for Faithful Latin Translation with RAG
Translating a morphology-rich, low-resource language like Latin poses significant challenges. This paper introduces a reproducible draft-based refinement pipeline that elevates open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) to a performance level statistically comparable to top-tier proprietary systems. Our method first uses a fine-tuned NLLB-1.3B model to generate a high-quality, structurally faithful draft. A zero-shot LLM (Llama-3.3 or Qwen3) then polishes this draft, a process that can be further enhanced by augmenting the context with retrieved out-context examples (RAG). We demonstrate the robustness of this approach on two distinct benchmarks: a standard in-domain test set (Rosenthal, 2023) and a new, challenging out-of-domain (OOD) set of 12th-century Latin letters (2025). Our central finding is that this open-source RAG system achieves performance statistically comparable to the GPT-5 baseline, without any task-specific LLM fine-tuning. We release the pipeline, the Chartres OOD set, and evaluation scripts and models to facilitate replicability and further research.
Self-Demos: Eliciting Out-of-Demonstration Generalizability in Large Language Models
Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising abilities of in-context learning (ICL), adapting swiftly to new tasks with only few-shot demonstrations. However, current few-shot methods heavily depend on high-quality, query-specific demos, which are often lacking. When faced with out-of-demonstration (OOD) queries, methods that rely on hand-crafted demos or external retrievers might fail. To bridge the gap between limited demos and OOD queries, we propose Self-Demos, a novel prompting method that elicits the inherent generalizability in LLMs by query-aware demo generation. The generated demos strategically interpolate between existing demos and the given query, transforming the query from OOD to ID. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we manually constructed OOD-Toolset, a dataset in the tool-using scenario with over 300 real-world APIs and 1000 instances, each consisting of three tool-use cases as demos and an OOD query. Thorough experiments on our dataset and two public math benchmarks have shown that our method can outperform state-of-the-art baselines in the OOD setting. Moreover, we conduct a range of analyses to validate Self-Demos's generalization and provide more insights.
Neuron Activation Coverage: Rethinking Out-of-distribution Detection and Generalization
The out-of-distribution (OOD) problem generally arises when neural networks encounter data that significantly deviates from the training data distribution, i.e., in-distribution (InD). In this paper, we study the OOD problem from a neuron activation view. We first formulate neuron activation states by considering both the neuron output and its influence on model decisions. Then, to characterize the relationship between neurons and OOD issues, we introduce the neuron activation coverage (NAC) -- a simple measure for neuron behaviors under InD data. Leveraging our NAC, we show that 1) InD and OOD inputs can be largely separated based on the neuron behavior, which significantly eases the OOD detection problem and beats the 21 previous methods over three benchmarks (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet-1K). 2) a positive correlation between NAC and model generalization ability consistently holds across architectures and datasets, which enables a NAC-based criterion for evaluating model robustness. Compared to prevalent InD validation criteria, we show that NAC not only can select more robust models, but also has a stronger correlation with OOD test performance.
VRA: Variational Rectified Activation for Out-of-distribution Detection
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is critical to building reliable machine learning systems in the open world. Researchers have proposed various strategies to reduce model overconfidence on OOD data. Among them, ReAct is a typical and effective technique to deal with model overconfidence, which truncates high activations to increase the gap between in-distribution and OOD. Despite its promising results, is this technique the best choice for widening the gap? To answer this question, we leverage the variational method to find the optimal operation and verify the necessity of suppressing abnormally low and high activations and amplifying intermediate activations in OOD detection, rather than focusing only on high activations like ReAct. This motivates us to propose a novel technique called ``Variational Rectified Activation (VRA)'', which simulates these suppression and amplification operations using piecewise functions. Experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing post-hoc strategies. Meanwhile, VRA is compatible with different scoring functions and network architectures. \textcolor[rgb]{0.93,0.0,0.47}{Our code can be found in Supplementary Material}.
Extremely Simple Multimodal Outlier Synthesis for Out-of-Distribution Detection and Segmentation
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection and segmentation are crucial for deploying machine learning models in safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving and robot-assisted surgery. While prior research has primarily focused on unimodal image data, real-world applications are inherently multimodal, requiring the integration of multiple modalities for improved OOD detection. A key challenge is the lack of supervision signals from unknown data, leading to overconfident predictions on OOD samples. To address this challenge, we propose Feature Mixing, an extremely simple and fast method for multimodal outlier synthesis with theoretical support, which can be further optimized to help the model better distinguish between in-distribution (ID) and OOD data. Feature Mixing is modality-agnostic and applicable to various modality combinations. Additionally, we introduce CARLA-OOD, a novel multimodal dataset for OOD segmentation, featuring synthetic OOD objects across diverse scenes and weather conditions. Extensive experiments on SemanticKITTI, nuScenes, CARLA-OOD datasets, and the MultiOOD benchmark demonstrate that Feature Mixing achieves state-of-the-art performance with a 10 times to 370 times speedup. Our source code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/mona4399/FeatureMixing.
VIBR: Learning View-Invariant Value Functions for Robust Visual Control
End-to-end reinforcement learning on images showed significant progress in the recent years. Data-based approach leverage data augmentation and domain randomization while representation learning methods use auxiliary losses to learn task-relevant features. Yet, reinforcement still struggles in visually diverse environments full of distractions and spurious noise. In this work, we tackle the problem of robust visual control at its core and present VIBR (View-Invariant Bellman Residuals), a method that combines multi-view training and invariant prediction to reduce out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization gap for RL based visuomotor control. Our model-free approach improve baselines performances without the need of additional representation learning objectives and with limited additional computational cost. We show that VIBR outperforms existing methods on complex visuo-motor control environment with high visual perturbation. Our approach achieves state-of the-art results on the Distracting Control Suite benchmark, a challenging benchmark still not solved by current methods, where we evaluate the robustness to a number of visual perturbators, as well as OOD generalization and extrapolation capabilities.
Battle of the Backbones: A Large-Scale Comparison of Pretrained Models across Computer Vision Tasks
Neural network based computer vision systems are typically built on a backbone, a pretrained or randomly initialized feature extractor. Several years ago, the default option was an ImageNet-trained convolutional neural network. However, the recent past has seen the emergence of countless backbones pretrained using various algorithms and datasets. While this abundance of choice has led to performance increases for a range of systems, it is difficult for practitioners to make informed decisions about which backbone to choose. Battle of the Backbones (BoB) makes this choice easier by benchmarking a diverse suite of pretrained models, including vision-language models, those trained via self-supervised learning, and the Stable Diffusion backbone, across a diverse set of computer vision tasks ranging from classification to object detection to OOD generalization and more. Furthermore, BoB sheds light on promising directions for the research community to advance computer vision by illuminating strengths and weakness of existing approaches through a comprehensive analysis conducted on more than 1500 training runs. While vision transformers (ViTs) and self-supervised learning (SSL) are increasingly popular, we find that convolutional neural networks pretrained in a supervised fashion on large training sets still perform best on most tasks among the models we consider. Moreover, in apples-to-apples comparisons on the same architectures and similarly sized pretraining datasets, we find that SSL backbones are highly competitive, indicating that future works should perform SSL pretraining with advanced architectures and larger pretraining datasets. We release the raw results of our experiments along with code that allows researchers to put their own backbones through the gauntlet here: https://github.com/hsouri/Battle-of-the-Backbones
Ariadne: A Controllable Framework for Probing and Extending VLM Reasoning Boundaries
While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) post-trained with Reinforcement Learning (RL) show impressive general reasoning, their evaluation is often confined to language-dominant tasks (e.g., math). This raises a critical question: can RL post-training truly extend the inherent capability boundary of a base VLM, particularly for visual-centric spatial tasks where it initially fails? To investigate this, we introduce Ariadne, a framework utilizing synthetic mazes for multi-step spatial reasoning where task difficulty (e.g., path length, turns) is precisely controlled. We leverage this controllable environment to train VLMs using Reinforcement Learning with Verified Rewards (RLVR) in a difficulty-aware curriculum. Surprisingly, post-RLVR training, the VLM achieves over 50% accuracy on a problem set where the base model scored 0%, demonstrating that our approach expands the model's initial capability boundary. To assess real-world viability, we evaluate out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization on practical benchmarks. Despite training only on synthetic maze samples, Ariadne achieves significant zero-shot improvements, averaging 16% on MapBench (e.g., museum navigation) and 24% on ReasonMap (subway transfer tasks). These results confirm that our method not only broadens the model's fundamental limits but also enhances its generalization to real-world spatial reasoning. We acknowledge our study is limited to the post-training phase, given the opaqueness of pre-training data, and hope our research motivates further work on specialized, capability-extending alignment.
Text-Augmented Multimodal LLMs for Chemical Reaction Condition Recommendation
High-throughput reaction condition (RC) screening is fundamental to chemical synthesis. However, current RC screening suffers from laborious and costly trial-and-error workflows. Traditional computer-aided synthesis planning (CASP) tools fail to find suitable RCs due to data sparsity and inadequate reaction representations. Nowadays, large language models (LLMs) are capable of tackling chemistry-related problems, such as molecule design, and chemical logic Q\&A tasks. However, LLMs have not yet achieved accurate predictions of chemical reaction conditions. Here, we present MM-RCR, a text-augmented multimodal LLM that learns a unified reaction representation from SMILES, reaction graphs, and textual corpus for chemical reaction recommendation (RCR). To train MM-RCR, we construct 1.2 million pair-wised Q\&A instruction datasets. Our experimental results demonstrate that MM-RCR achieves state-of-the-art performance on two open benchmark datasets and exhibits strong generalization capabilities on out-of-domain (OOD) and High-Throughput Experimentation (HTE) datasets. MM-RCR has the potential to accelerate high-throughput condition screening in chemical synthesis.
Revisiting Logit Distributions for Reliable Out-of-Distribution Detection
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is critical for ensuring the reliability of deep learning models in open-world applications. While post-hoc methods are favored for their efficiency and ease of deployment, existing approaches often underexploit the rich information embedded in the model's logits space. In this paper, we propose LogitGap, a novel post-hoc OOD detection method that explicitly exploits the relationship between the maximum logit and the remaining logits to enhance the separability between in-distribution (ID) and OOD samples. To further improve its effectiveness, we refine LogitGap by focusing on a more compact and informative subset of the logit space. Specifically, we introduce a training-free strategy that automatically identifies the most informative logits for scoring. We provide both theoretical analysis and empirical evidence to validate the effectiveness of our approach. Extensive experiments on both vision-language and vision-only models demonstrate that LogitGap consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse OOD detection scenarios and benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/GIT-LJc/LogitGap.
Just Say the Name: Online Continual Learning with Category Names Only via Data Generation
In real-world scenarios, extensive manual annotation for continual learning is impractical due to prohibitive costs. Although prior arts, influenced by large-scale webly supervised training, suggest leveraging web-scraped data in continual learning, this poses challenges such as data imbalance, usage restrictions, and privacy concerns. Addressing the risks of continual webly supervised training, we present an online continual learning framework - Generative Name only Continual Learning (G-NoCL). The proposed G-NoCL uses a set of generators G along with the learner. When encountering new concepts (i.e., classes), G-NoCL employs the novel sample complexity-guided data ensembling technique DIverSity and COmplexity enhancing ensemBlER (DISCOBER) to optimally sample training data from generated data. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate superior performance of DISCOBER in G-NoCL online CL benchmarks, covering both In-Distribution (ID) and Out-of-Distribution (OOD) generalization evaluations, compared to naive generator-ensembling, web-supervised, and manually annotated data.
Anomaly Detection under Distribution Shift
Anomaly detection (AD) is a crucial machine learning task that aims to learn patterns from a set of normal training samples to identify abnormal samples in test data. Most existing AD studies assume that the training and test data are drawn from the same data distribution, but the test data can have large distribution shifts arising in many real-world applications due to different natural variations such as new lighting conditions, object poses, or background appearances, rendering existing AD methods ineffective in such cases. In this paper, we consider the problem of anomaly detection under distribution shift and establish performance benchmarks on three widely-used AD and out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization datasets. We demonstrate that simple adaptation of state-of-the-art OOD generalization methods to AD settings fails to work effectively due to the lack of labeled anomaly data. We further introduce a novel robust AD approach to diverse distribution shifts by minimizing the distribution gap between in-distribution and OOD normal samples in both the training and inference stages in an unsupervised way. Our extensive empirical results on the three datasets show that our approach substantially outperforms state-of-the-art AD methods and OOD generalization methods on data with various distribution shifts, while maintaining the detection accuracy on in-distribution data.
WDiscOOD: Out-of-Distribution Detection via Whitened Linear Discriminant Analysis
Deep neural networks are susceptible to generating overconfident yet erroneous predictions when presented with data beyond known concepts. This challenge underscores the importance of detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) samples in the open world. In this work, we propose a novel feature-space OOD detection score based on class-specific and class-agnostic information. Specifically, the approach utilizes Whitened Linear Discriminant Analysis to project features into two subspaces - the discriminative and residual subspaces - for which the in-distribution (ID) classes are maximally separated and closely clustered, respectively. The OOD score is then determined by combining the deviation from the input data to the ID pattern in both subspaces. The efficacy of our method, named WDiscOOD, is verified on the large-scale ImageNet-1k benchmark, with six OOD datasets that cover a variety of distribution shifts. WDiscOOD demonstrates superior performance on deep classifiers with diverse backbone architectures, including CNN and vision transformer. Furthermore, we also show that WDiscOOD more effectively detects novel concepts in representation spaces trained with contrastive objectives, including supervised contrastive loss and multi-modality contrastive loss.
Model Stock: All we need is just a few fine-tuned models
This paper introduces an efficient fine-tuning method for large pre-trained models, offering strong in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) performance. Breaking away from traditional practices that need a multitude of fine-tuned models for averaging, our approach employs significantly fewer models to achieve final weights yet yield superior accuracy. Drawing from key insights in the weight space of fine-tuned weights, we uncover a strong link between the performance and proximity to the center of weight space. Based on this, we introduce a method that approximates a center-close weight using only two fine-tuned models, applicable during or after training. Our innovative layer-wise weight averaging technique surpasses state-of-the-art model methods such as Model Soup, utilizing only two fine-tuned models. This strategy can be aptly coined Model Stock, highlighting its reliance on selecting a minimal number of models to draw a more optimized-averaged model. We demonstrate the efficacy of Model Stock with fine-tuned models based upon pre-trained CLIP architectures, achieving remarkable performance on both ID and OOD tasks on the standard benchmarks, all while barely bringing extra computational demands. Our code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/naver-ai/model-stock.
Generalized Out-of-Distribution Detection and Beyond in Vision Language Model Era: A Survey
Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) samples is crucial for ensuring the safety of machine learning systems and has shaped the field of OOD detection. Meanwhile, several other problems are closely related to OOD detection, including anomaly detection (AD), novelty detection (ND), open set recognition (OSR), and outlier detection (OD). To unify these problems, a generalized OOD detection framework was proposed, taxonomically categorizing these five problems. However, Vision Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP have significantly changed the paradigm and blurred the boundaries between these fields, again confusing researchers. In this survey, we first present a generalized OOD detection v2, encapsulating the evolution of AD, ND, OSR, OOD detection, and OD in the VLM era. Our framework reveals that, with some field inactivity and integration, the demanding challenges have become OOD detection and AD. In addition, we also highlight the significant shift in the definition, problem settings, and benchmarks; we thus feature a comprehensive review of the methodology for OOD detection, including the discussion over other related tasks to clarify their relationship to OOD detection. Finally, we explore the advancements in the emerging Large Vision Language Model (LVLM) era, such as GPT-4V. We conclude this survey with open challenges and future directions.
Chart-RVR: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards for Explainable Chart Reasoning
The capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have reached state-of-the-art on many visual reasoning tasks, including chart reasoning, yet they still falter on out-of-distribution (OOD) data, and degrade further when asked to produce their chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales, limiting explainability. We present Chart-RVR, a general framework that fine-tunes LVLMs to be more robust and explainable for chart reasoning by coupling Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with automatically verifiable rewards. Our framework comprises of three rewards that maximize: (i) correct chart-type classification, (ii) faithful chart table reconstruction, and (iii) process conformity. Applied to 3-billion-parameter LVLMs, Chart-RVR consistently outperforms standard supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution datasets, closing the OOD performance gap while improving rationale fidelity. The resulting models, the Chart-RVR-3B series, achieve state-of-the-art results on six chart-reasoning benchmarks spanning in-domain and OOD settings, surpassing all existing models of comparable size. Beyond accuracy, Chart-RVR yields more interpretable CoT rationales, strengthening trust and reliability - showcasing the power of verifiable rewards with GRPO for training reliable, interpretable chart-reasoning models.
DeTeCtive: Detecting AI-generated Text via Multi-Level Contrastive Learning
Current techniques for detecting AI-generated text are largely confined to manual feature crafting and supervised binary classification paradigms. These methodologies typically lead to performance bottlenecks and unsatisfactory generalizability. Consequently, these methods are often inapplicable for out-of-distribution (OOD) data and newly emerged large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we revisit the task of AI-generated text detection. We argue that the key to accomplishing this task lies in distinguishing writing styles of different authors, rather than simply classifying the text into human-written or AI-generated text. To this end, we propose DeTeCtive, a multi-task auxiliary, multi-level contrastive learning framework. DeTeCtive is designed to facilitate the learning of distinct writing styles, combined with a dense information retrieval pipeline for AI-generated text detection. Our method is compatible with a range of text encoders. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method enhances the ability of various text encoders in detecting AI-generated text across multiple benchmarks and achieves state-of-the-art results. Notably, in OOD zero-shot evaluation, our method outperforms existing approaches by a large margin. Moreover, we find our method boasts a Training-Free Incremental Adaptation (TFIA) capability towards OOD data, further enhancing its efficacy in OOD detection scenarios. We will open-source our code and models in hopes that our work will spark new thoughts in the field of AI-generated text detection, ensuring safe application of LLMs and enhancing compliance. Our code is available at https://github.com/heyongxin233/DeTeCtive.
SeTAR: Out-of-Distribution Detection with Selective Low-Rank Approximation
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is crucial for the safe deployment of neural networks. Existing CLIP-based approaches perform OOD detection by devising novel scoring functions or sophisticated fine-tuning methods. In this work, we propose SeTAR, a novel, training-free OOD detection method that leverages selective low-rank approximation of weight matrices in vision-language and vision-only models. SeTAR enhances OOD detection via post-hoc modification of the model's weight matrices using a simple greedy search algorithm. Based on SeTAR, we further propose SeTAR+FT, a fine-tuning extension optimizing model performance for OOD detection tasks. Extensive evaluations on ImageNet1K and Pascal-VOC benchmarks show SeTAR's superior performance, reducing the relatively false positive rate by up to 18.95% and 36.80% compared to zero-shot and fine-tuning baselines. Ablation studies further validate SeTAR's effectiveness, robustness, and generalizability across different model backbones. Our work offers a scalable, efficient solution for OOD detection, setting a new state-of-the-art in this area.
Image Background Serves as Good Proxy for Out-of-distribution Data
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection empowers the model trained on the closed image set to identify unknown data in the open world. Though many prior techniques have yielded considerable improvements in this research direction, two crucial obstacles still remain. Firstly, a unified perspective has yet to be presented to view the developed arts with individual designs, which is vital for providing insights into future work. Secondly, we expect sufficient natural OOD supervision to promote the generation of compact boundaries between the in-distribution (ID) and OOD data without collecting explicit OOD samples. To tackle these issues, we propose a general probabilistic framework to interpret many existing methods and an OOD-data-free model, namely Self-supervised Sampling for OOD Detection (SSOD). SSOD efficiently exploits natural OOD signals from the ID data based on the local property of convolution. With these supervisions, it jointly optimizes the OOD detection and conventional ID classification in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments reveal that SSOD establishes competitive state-of-the-art performance on many large-scale benchmarks, outperforming the best previous method by a large margin, \eg, reporting -6.28\% FPR95 and +0.77\% AUROC on ImageNet, -19.01\% FPR95 and +3.04\% AUROC on CIFAR-10, and top-ranked performance on hard OOD datasets, \ie, ImageNet-O and OpenImage-O.
LLMs for Relational Reasoning: How Far are We?
Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized many areas (e.g. natural language processing, software engineering, etc.) by achieving state-of-the-art performance on extensive downstream tasks. Aiming to achieve robust and general artificial intelligence, there has been a surge of interest in investigating the reasoning ability of the LLMs. Whereas the textual and numerical reasoning benchmarks adopted by previous works are rather shallow and simple, it is hard to conclude that the LLMs possess strong reasoning ability by merely achieving positive results on these benchmarks. Recent efforts have demonstrated that the LLMs are poor at solving sequential decision-making problems that require common-sense planning by evaluating their performance on the reinforcement learning benchmarks. In this work, we conduct an in-depth assessment of several state-of-the-art LLMs' reasoning ability based on the inductive logic programming (ILP) benchmark, which is broadly recognized as a representative and challenging measurement for evaluating logic program induction/synthesis systems as it requires inducing strict cause-effect logic to achieve robust deduction on independent and identically distributed (IID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) test samples. Our evaluations illustrate that compared with the neural program induction systems which are much smaller in model size, the state-of-the-art LLMs are much poorer in terms of reasoning ability by achieving much lower performance and generalization using either natural language prompting or truth-value matrix prompting.
MV-RAG: Retrieval Augmented Multiview Diffusion
Text-to-3D generation approaches have advanced significantly by leveraging pretrained 2D diffusion priors, producing high-quality and 3D-consistent outputs. However, they often fail to produce out-of-domain (OOD) or rare concepts, yielding inconsistent or inaccurate results. To this end, we propose MV-RAG, a novel text-to-3D pipeline that first retrieves relevant 2D images from a large in-the-wild 2D database and then conditions a multiview diffusion model on these images to synthesize consistent and accurate multiview outputs. Training such a retrieval-conditioned model is achieved via a novel hybrid strategy bridging structured multiview data and diverse 2D image collections. This involves training on multiview data using augmented conditioning views that simulate retrieval variance for view-specific reconstruction, alongside training on sets of retrieved real-world 2D images using a distinctive held-out view prediction objective: the model predicts the held-out view from the other views to infer 3D consistency from 2D data. To facilitate a rigorous OOD evaluation, we introduce a new collection of challenging OOD prompts. Experiments against state-of-the-art text-to-3D, image-to-3D, and personalization baselines show that our approach significantly improves 3D consistency, photorealism, and text adherence for OOD/rare concepts, while maintaining competitive performance on standard benchmarks.
Automatic Legal Writing Evaluation of LLMs
Despite the recent advances in Large Language Models, benchmarks for evaluating legal writing remain scarce due to the inherent complexity of assessing open-ended responses in this domain. One of the key challenges in evaluating language models on domain-specific tasks is finding test datasets that are public, frequently updated, and contain comprehensive evaluation guidelines. The Brazilian Bar Examination meets these requirements. We introduce oab-bench, a benchmark comprising 105 questions across seven areas of law from recent editions of the exam. The benchmark includes comprehensive evaluation guidelines and reference materials used by human examiners to ensure consistent grading. We evaluate the performance of four LLMs on oab-bench, finding that Claude-3.5 Sonnet achieves the best results with an average score of 7.93 out of 10, passing all 21 exams. We also investigated whether LLMs can serve as reliable automated judges for evaluating legal writing. Our experiments show that frontier models like OpenAI's o1 achieve a strong correlation with human scores when evaluating approved exams, suggesting their potential as reliable automated evaluators despite the inherently subjective nature of legal writing assessment. The source code and the benchmark -- containing questions, evaluation guidelines, model-generated responses, and their respective automated evaluations -- are publicly available.
JavaBench: A Benchmark of Object-Oriented Code Generation for Evaluating Large Language Models
Code generation benchmarks such as HumanEval are widely adopted to evaluate LLMs' capabilities. However, after consolidating the latest 24 benchmarks, we noticed three significant imbalances. First, imbalanced programming language. 95.8% of benchmarks involve Python, while only 5 benchmarks involve Java. Second, imbalanced code granularity. Function-/statement-level benchmarks account for over 83.3% of benchmarks. Only a mere handful extends to class-/project-levels, and all are limited to Python. Third, lacking advanced features. Existing benchmarks primarily assess basic coding skills, while overlooking advanced Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) features (i.e., encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism). To fill these gaps, we propose JavaBench, a project-level Java benchmark that exercises OOP features. It comprises four Java projects with 389 methods in 106 Java classes. The test coverage is up to 92%, and JavaBench is attested by 282 undergraduate students, reaching a 90.93/100 average score (i.e., pass rate against the test suite), ensuring the quality of documentation, code skeleton, and tests. To better evaluate LLM's capability against JavaBench, we introduce a systematic evaluation design covering three context settings and five synthesis strategies at two granularities using three hierarchical metrics. Our extensive experiment yields several interesting findings. First, we noticed that regarding project-level Java programming, LLMs are far behind undergraduate students (no project can be correctly completed by any studied LLMs, and at most 41.17% Pass@5 in a more relaxed evaluation). Second, using method signature as prompt context may strike an ideal balance for project-level code generation. JavaBench is publicly available at https://github.com/java-bench/JavaBench.
A Multi-Language Object-Oriented Programming Benchmark for Large Language Models
Establishing fair and robust benchmarks is essential for evaluating intelligent code generation by large language models (LLMs). Our survey of 35 existing benchmarks uncovers three major imbalances: 85.7% focus on a single programming language; 94.3% target only function-level or statement-level tasks; and over 80% include fewer than ten test cases on average. To address these gaps, we propose MultiOOP, a multi-language object-oriented programming benchmark covering six popular languages (Python, PHP, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript) with 267 tasks per language. We design a translator that extends an existing single-language OOP benchmark and the pass@o metric to a multilingual setting. Moreover, we propose an automated framework for augmenting test cases to ensure the reliability of the evaluation results. We evaluate 14 mainstream LLMs under zero-shot prompting and report three key findings: 1) Substantial performance degradation: pass@1 scores on MultiOOP drop by up to 65.6 percentage points compared to function-level tasks (e.g., HumanEval). 2) Cross-language variability: GPT-4o mini achieves pass@1 of 48.06% in Python but only 0.12%-15.26% in other languages, indicating limited multilingual generalization. 3) Conceptual gaps: pass@o scores are consistently 1.1-19.2 points lower than pass@k, demonstrating that LLMs often generate executable code without fully capturing core OOP concepts. Our benchmark, metric extensions, and evaluation scripts will be publicly released to foster a more balanced and comprehensive assessment of LLMs in object-oriented code generation. Our code and data will be released at https://github.com/alphadl/OOP-eval and https://huggingface.co/datasets/codeai-dteam/MultiOOP respectively.
OJBench: A Competition Level Code Benchmark For Large Language Models
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant progress in math and code reasoning capabilities. However, existing code benchmark are limited in their ability to evaluate the full spectrum of these capabilities, particularly at the competitive level. To bridge this gap, we introduce OJBench, a novel and challenging benchmark designed to assess the competitive-level code reasoning abilities of LLMs. OJBench comprises 232 programming competition problems from NOI and ICPC, providing a more rigorous test of models' reasoning skills. We conducted a comprehensive evaluation using OJBench on 37 models, including both closed-source and open-source models, reasoning-oriented and non-reasoning-oriented models. Our results indicate that even state-of-the-art reasoning-oriented models, such as o4-mini and Gemini-2.5-pro-exp, struggle with highly challenging competition-level problems. This highlights the significant challenges that models face in competitive-level code reasoning.
CodeElo: Benchmarking Competition-level Code Generation of LLMs with Human-comparable Elo Ratings
With the increasing code reasoning capabilities of existing large language models (LLMs) and breakthroughs in reasoning models like OpenAI o1 and o3, there is a growing need to develop more challenging and comprehensive benchmarks that effectively test their sophisticated competition-level coding abilities. Existing benchmarks, like LiveCodeBench and USACO, fall short due to the unavailability of private test cases, lack of support for special judges, and misaligned execution environments. To bridge this gap, we introduce CodeElo, a standardized competition-level code generation benchmark that effectively addresses all these challenges for the first time. CodeElo benchmark is mainly based on the official CodeForces platform and tries to align with the platform as much as possible. We compile the recent six months of contest problems on CodeForces with detailed information such as contest divisions, problem difficulty ratings, and problem algorithm tags. We introduce a unique judging method in which problems are submitted directly to the platform and develop a reliable Elo rating calculation system that aligns with the platform and is comparable with human participants but has lower variance. By testing on our CodeElo, we provide the Elo ratings of 30 existing popular open-source and 3 proprietary LLMs for the first time. The results show that o1-mini and QwQ-32B-Preview stand out significantly, achieving Elo ratings of 1578 and 1261, respectively, while other models struggle even with the easiest problems, placing in the lowest 20 percent among all human participants. Detailed analysis experiments are also conducted to provide insights into performance across algorithms and comparisons between using C++ and Python, which can suggest directions for future studies.
OIBench: Benchmarking Strong Reasoning Models with Olympiad in Informatics
As models become increasingly sophisticated, conventional algorithm benchmarks are increasingly saturated, underscoring the need for more challenging benchmarks to guide future improvements in algorithmic reasoning. This paper introduces OIBench, a high-quality, private, and challenging olympiad-level informatics dataset comprising 250 carefully curated original problems. We detail the construction methodology of the benchmark, ensuring a comprehensive assessment across various programming paradigms and complexities, and we demonstrate its contamination-resistant properties via experiments. We propose Time/Space Completion Curves for finer-grained efficiency analysis and enable direct human-model comparisons through high-level participant evaluations. Our experiments reveal that while open-source models lag behind closed-source counterparts, current SOTA models already outperform most human participants in both correctness and efficiency, while still being suboptimal compared to the canonical solutions. By releasing OIBench as a fully open-source resource (https://huggingface.co/datasets/AGI-Eval/OIBench), we hope this benchmark will contribute to advancing code reasoning capabilities for future LLMs.
A Case Study of Web App Coding with OpenAI Reasoning Models
This paper presents a case study of coding tasks by the latest reasoning models of OpenAI, i.e. o1-preview and o1-mini, in comparison with other frontier models. The o1 models deliver SOTA results for WebApp1K, a single-task benchmark. To this end, we introduce WebApp1K-Duo, a harder benchmark doubling number of tasks and test cases. The new benchmark causes the o1 model performances to decline significantly, falling behind Claude 3.5. Moreover, they consistently fail when confronted with atypical yet correct test cases, a trap non-reasoning models occasionally avoid. We hypothesize that the performance variability is due to instruction comprehension. Specifically, the reasoning mechanism boosts performance when all expectations are captured, meanwhile exacerbates errors when key expectations are missed, potentially impacted by input lengths. As such, we argue that the coding success of reasoning models hinges on the top-notch base model and SFT to ensure meticulous adherence to instructions.
Align and Distill: Unifying and Improving Domain Adaptive Object Detection
Object detectors often perform poorly on data that differs from their training set. Domain adaptive object detection (DAOD) methods have recently demonstrated strong results on addressing this challenge. Unfortunately, we identify systemic benchmarking pitfalls that call past results into question and hamper further progress: (a) Overestimation of performance due to underpowered baselines, (b) Inconsistent implementation practices preventing transparent comparisons of methods, and (c) Lack of generality due to outdated backbones and lack of diversity in benchmarks. We address these problems by introducing: (1) A unified benchmarking and implementation framework, Align and Distill (ALDI), enabling comparison of DAOD methods and supporting future development, (2) A fair and modern training and evaluation protocol for DAOD that addresses benchmarking pitfalls, (3) A new DAOD benchmark dataset, CFC-DAOD, enabling evaluation on diverse real-world data, and (4) A new method, ALDI++, that achieves state-of-the-art results by a large margin. ALDI++ outperforms the previous state-of-the-art by +3.5 AP50 on Cityscapes to Foggy Cityscapes, +5.7 AP50 on Sim10k to Cityscapes (where ours is the only method to outperform a fair baseline), and +0.6 AP50 on CFC Kenai to Channel. ALDI and ALDI++ are architecture-agnostic, setting a new state-of-the-art for YOLO and DETR-based DAOD as well without additional hyperparameter tuning. Our framework, dataset, and state-of-the-art method offer a critical reset for DAOD and provide a strong foundation for future research. Code and data are available: https://github.com/justinkay/aldi and https://github.com/visipedia/caltech-fish-counting.
BenchmarkCards: Standardized Documentation for Large Language Model Benchmarks
Large language models (LLMs) are powerful tools capable of handling diverse tasks. Comparing and selecting appropriate LLMs for specific tasks requires systematic evaluation methods, as models exhibit varying capabilities across different domains. However, finding suitable benchmarks is difficult given the many available options. This complexity not only increases the risk of benchmark misuse and misinterpretation but also demands substantial effort from LLM users, seeking the most suitable benchmarks for their specific needs. To address these issues, we introduce BenchmarkCards, an intuitive and validated documentation framework that standardizes critical benchmark attributes such as objectives, methodologies, data sources, and limitations. Through user studies involving benchmark creators and users, we show that BenchmarkCards can simplify benchmark selection and enhance transparency, facilitating informed decision-making in evaluating LLMs. Data & Code: https://github.com/SokolAnn/BenchmarkCards
CLOVER: A Test Case Generation Benchmark with Coverage, Long-Context, and Verification
Software testing is a critical aspect of software development, yet generating test cases remains a routine task for engineers. This paper presents a benchmark, CLOVER, to evaluate models' capabilities in generating and completing test cases under specific conditions. Spanning from simple assertion completions to writing test cases that cover specific code blocks across multiple files, these tasks are based on 12 python repositories, analyzing 845 problems with context lengths ranging from 4k to 128k tokens. Utilizing code testing frameworks, we propose a method to construct retrieval contexts using coverage information. While models exhibit comparable performance with short contexts, notable differences emerge with 16k contexts. Notably, models like GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 can effectively leverage relevant snippets; however, all models score below 35\% on the complex Task III, even with the oracle context provided, underscoring the benchmark's significance and the potential for model improvement. The benchmark is containerized for code execution across tasks, and we will release the code, data, and construction methodologies.
Alpha Excel Benchmark
This study presents a novel benchmark for evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) using challenges derived from the Financial Modeling World Cup (FMWC) Excel competitions. We introduce a methodology for converting 113 existing FMWC challenges into programmatically evaluable JSON formats and use this dataset to compare the performance of several leading LLMs. Our findings demonstrate significant variations in performance across different challenge categories, with models showing specific strengths in pattern recognition tasks but struggling with complex numerical reasoning. The benchmark provides a standardized framework for assessing LLM capabilities in realistic business-oriented tasks rather than abstract academic problems. This research contributes to the growing field of AI benchmarking by establishing proficiency among the 1.5 billion people who daily use Microsoft Excel as a meaningful evaluation metric that bridges the gap between academic AI benchmarks and practical business applications.
OSS-Bench: Benchmark Generator for Coding LLMs
In light of the rapid adoption of AI coding assistants, LLM-assisted development has become increasingly prevalent, creating an urgent need for robust evaluation of generated code quality. Existing benchmarks often require extensive manual effort to create static datasets, rely on indirect or insufficiently challenging tasks, depend on non-scalable ground truth, or neglect critical low-level security evaluations, particularly memory-safety issues. In this work, we introduce OSS-Bench, a benchmark generator that automatically constructs large-scale, live evaluation tasks from real-world open-source software. OSS-Bench replaces functions with LLM-generated code and evaluates them using three natural metrics: compilability, functional correctness, and memory safety, leveraging robust signals like compilation failures, test-suite violations, and sanitizer alerts as ground truth. In our evaluation, the benchmark, instantiated as OSS-Bench(php) and OSS-Bench(sql), profiles 17 diverse LLMs, revealing insights such as intra-family behavioral patterns and inconsistencies between model size and performance. Our results demonstrate that OSS-Bench mitigates overfitting by leveraging the evolving complexity of OSS and highlights LLMs' limited understanding of low-level code security via extended fuzzing experiments. Overall, OSS-Bench offers a practical and scalable framework for benchmarking the real-world coding capabilities of LLMs.
How Should I Build A Benchmark? Revisiting Code-Related Benchmarks For LLMs
Various benchmarks have been proposed to assess the performance of large language models (LLMs) in different coding scenarios. We refer to them as code-related benchmarks. However, there are no systematic guidelines by which such a benchmark should be developed to ensure its quality, reliability, and reproducibility. We propose How2Bench, which is comprised of a 55- 55-criteria checklist as a set of guidelines to govern the development of code-related benchmarks comprehensively. Using HOW2BENCH, we profiled 274 benchmarks released within the past decade and found concerning issues. Nearly 70% of the benchmarks did not take measures for data quality assurance; over 10% did not even open source or only partially open source. Many highly cited benchmarks have loopholes, including duplicated samples, incorrect reference codes/tests/prompts, and unremoved sensitive/confidential information. Finally, we conducted a human study involving 49 participants, which revealed significant gaps in awareness of the importance of data quality, reproducibility, and transparency.
DeepSea MOT: A benchmark dataset for multi-object tracking on deep-sea video
Benchmarking multi-object tracking and object detection model performance is an essential step in machine learning model development, as it allows researchers to evaluate model detection and tracker performance on human-generated 'test' data, facilitating consistent comparisons between models and trackers and aiding performance optimization. In this study, a novel benchmark video dataset was developed and used to assess the performance of several Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute object detection models and a FathomNet single-class object detection model together with several trackers. The dataset consists of four video sequences representing midwater and benthic deep-sea habitats. Performance was evaluated using Higher Order Tracking Accuracy, a metric that balances detection, localization, and association accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first publicly available benchmark for multi-object tracking in deep-sea video footage. We provide the benchmark data, a clearly documented workflow for generating additional benchmark videos, as well as example Python notebooks for computing metrics.
AixBench: A Code Generation Benchmark Dataset
We present a benchmark dataset for evaluating method-level code generation task. The benchmark contains a dataset of 175 samples for automated evaluation and a dataset of 161 samples for manual evaluation. We also present a new metric for automatically evaluating the correctness of the generated code, and a set of criteria to manually evaluating the overall quality of the generated code.
BigCodeBench: Benchmarking Code Generation with Diverse Function Calls and Complex Instructions
Automated software engineering has been greatly empowered by the recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) for programming. While current benchmarks have shown that LLMs can perform various software engineering tasks like human developers, the majority of their evaluations are limited to short and self-contained algorithmic tasks. Solving challenging and practical programming tasks requires the capability of utilizing diverse function calls as tools to efficiently implement functionalities like data analysis and web development. In addition, using multiple tools to solve a task needs compositional reasoning by accurately understanding complex instructions. Fulfilling both of these characteristics can pose a great challenge for LLMs. To assess how well LLMs can solve challenging and practical programming tasks, we introduce Bench, a benchmark that challenges LLMs to invoke multiple function calls as tools from 139 libraries and 7 domains for 1,140 fine-grained programming tasks. To evaluate LLMs rigorously, each programming task encompasses 5.6 test cases with an average branch coverage of 99%. In addition, we propose a natural-language-oriented variant of Bench, Benchi, that automatically transforms the original docstrings into short instructions only with essential information. Our extensive evaluation of 60 LLMs shows that LLMs are not yet capable of following complex instructions to use function calls precisely, with scores up to 60%, significantly lower than the human performance of 97%. The results underscore the need for further advancements in this area.
Program Synthesis Benchmark for Visual Programming in XLogoOnline Environment
Large language and multimodal models have shown remarkable successes on various benchmarks focused on specific skills such as general-purpose programming, natural language understanding, math word problem-solving, and visual question answering. However, it is unclear how well these models perform on tasks that require a combination of these skills. In this paper, we curate a novel program synthesis benchmark based on the XLogoOnline visual programming environment. The benchmark comprises 85 real-world tasks from the Mini-level of the XLogoOnline environment, each requiring a combination of different skills such as spatial planning, basic programming, and logical reasoning. Our evaluation shows that current state-of-the-art models like GPT-4V and Llama3-70B struggle to solve these tasks, achieving only 20% and 2.35% success rates. Next, we develop a fine-tuning pipeline to boost the performance of models by leveraging a large-scale synthetic training dataset with over 80000 tasks. Moreover, we showcase how emulator-driven feedback can be used to design a curriculum over training data distribution. We showcase that a fine-tuned Llama3-8B drastically outperforms GPT-4V and Llama3-70B models, and provide an in-depth analysis of the models' expertise across different skill dimensions. We will publicly release the benchmark for future research on program synthesis in visual programming.
DependEval: Benchmarking LLMs for Repository Dependency Understanding
While large language models (LLMs) have shown considerable promise in code generation, real-world software development demands advanced repository-level reasoning. This includes understanding dependencies, project structures, and managing multi-file changes. However, the ability of LLMs to effectively comprehend and handle complex code repositories has yet to be fully explored. To address challenges, we introduce a hierarchical benchmark designed to evaluate repository dependency understanding (DependEval). Benchmark is based on 15,576 repositories collected from real-world websites. It evaluates models on three core tasks: Dependency Recognition, Repository Construction, and Multi-file Editing, across 8 programming languages from actual code repositories. Our evaluation of over 25 LLMs reveals substantial performance gaps and provides valuable insights into repository-level code understanding.
ScholarBench: A Bilingual Benchmark for Abstraction, Comprehension, and Reasoning Evaluation in Academic Contexts
Prior benchmarks for evaluating the domain-specific knowledge of large language models (LLMs) lack the scalability to handle complex academic tasks. To address this, we introduce ScholarBench, a benchmark centered on deep expert knowledge and complex academic problem-solving, which evaluates the academic reasoning ability of LLMs and is constructed through a three-step process. ScholarBench targets more specialized and logically complex contexts derived from academic literature, encompassing five distinct problem types. Unlike prior benchmarks, ScholarBench evaluates the abstraction, comprehension, and reasoning capabilities of LLMs across eight distinct research domains. To ensure high-quality evaluation data, we define category-specific example attributes and design questions that are aligned with the characteristic research methodologies and discourse structures of each domain. Additionally, this benchmark operates as an English-Korean bilingual dataset, facilitating simultaneous evaluation for linguistic capabilities of LLMs in both languages. The benchmark comprises 5,031 examples in Korean and 5,309 in English, with even state-of-the-art models like o3-mini achieving an average evaluation score of only 0.543, demonstrating the challenging nature of this benchmark.
What are the best systems? New perspectives on NLP Benchmarking
In Machine Learning, a benchmark refers to an ensemble of datasets associated with one or multiple metrics together with a way to aggregate different systems performances. They are instrumental in (i) assessing the progress of new methods along different axes and (ii) selecting the best systems for practical use. This is particularly the case for NLP with the development of large pre-trained models (e.g. GPT, BERT) that are expected to generalize well on a variety of tasks. While the community mainly focused on developing new datasets and metrics, there has been little interest in the aggregation procedure, which is often reduced to a simple average over various performance measures. However, this procedure can be problematic when the metrics are on a different scale, which may lead to spurious conclusions. This paper proposes a new procedure to rank systems based on their performance across different tasks. Motivated by the social choice theory, the final system ordering is obtained through aggregating the rankings induced by each task and is theoretically grounded. We conduct extensive numerical experiments (on over 270k scores) to assess the soundness of our approach both on synthetic and real scores (e.g. GLUE, EXTREM, SEVAL, TAC, FLICKR). In particular, we show that our method yields different conclusions on state-of-the-art systems than the mean-aggregation procedure while being both more reliable and robust.
Zero-shot Benchmarking: A Framework for Flexible and Scalable Automatic Evaluation of Language Models
As language models improve and become capable of performing more complex tasks across modalities, evaluating them automatically becomes increasingly challenging. Developing strong and robust task-specific automatic metrics gets harder, and human-annotated test sets -- which are expensive to create -- saturate more quickly. A compelling alternative is to design reliable strategies to automate the creation of test data and evaluation, but previous attempts either rely on pre-existing data, or focus solely on individual tasks. We present Zero-shot Benchmarking (ZSB), a framework for creating high-quality benchmarks for any task by leveraging language models for both synthetic test data creation and evaluation. ZSB is simple and flexible: it requires only the creation of a prompt for data generation and one for evaluation; it is scalable to tasks and languages where collecting real-world data is costly or impractical; it is model-agnostic, allowing the creation of increasingly challenging benchmarks as models improve. To assess the effectiveness of our framework, we create benchmarks for five text-only tasks and a multi-modal one: general capabilities in four languages (English, Chinese, French, and Korean), translation, and general vision-language capabilities in English. We then rank a broad range of open and closed systems on our benchmarks. ZSB rankings consistently correlate strongly with human rankings, outperforming widely-adopted standard benchmarks. Through ablations, we find that strong benchmarks can be created with open models, and that judge model size and dataset variety are crucial drivers of performance. We release all our benchmarks, and code to reproduce our experiments and to produce new benchmarks.
PRBench: Large-Scale Expert Rubrics for Evaluating High-Stakes Professional Reasoning
Frontier model progress is often measured by academic benchmarks, which offer a limited view of performance in real-world professional contexts. Existing evaluations often fail to assess open-ended, economically consequential tasks in high-stakes domains like Legal and Finance, where practical returns are paramount. To address this, we introduce Professional Reasoning Bench (PRBench), a realistic, open-ended, and difficult benchmark of real-world problems in Finance and Law. We open-source its 1,100 expert-authored tasks and 19,356 expert-curated criteria, making it, to our knowledge, the largest public, rubric-based benchmark for both legal and finance domains. We recruit 182 qualified professionals, holding JDs, CFAs, or 6+ years of experience, who contributed tasks inspired by their actual workflows. This process yields significant diversity, with tasks spanning 114 countries and 47 US jurisdictions. Our expert-curated rubrics are validated through a rigorous quality pipeline, including independent expert validation. Subsequent evaluation of 20 leading models reveals substantial room for improvement, with top scores of only 0.39 (Finance) and 0.37 (Legal) on our Hard subsets. We further catalog associated economic impacts of the prompts and analyze performance using human-annotated rubric categories. Our analysis shows that models with similar overall scores can diverge significantly on specific capabilities. Common failure modes include inaccurate judgments, a lack of process transparency and incomplete reasoning, highlighting critical gaps in their reliability for professional adoption.
Open World Object Detection in the Era of Foundation Models
Object detection is integral to a bevy of real-world applications, from robotics to medical image analysis. To be used reliably in such applications, models must be capable of handling unexpected - or novel - objects. The open world object detection (OWD) paradigm addresses this challenge by enabling models to detect unknown objects and learn discovered ones incrementally. However, OWD method development is hindered due to the stringent benchmark and task definitions. These definitions effectively prohibit foundation models. Here, we aim to relax these definitions and investigate the utilization of pre-trained foundation models in OWD. First, we show that existing benchmarks are insufficient in evaluating methods that utilize foundation models, as even naive integration methods nearly saturate these benchmarks. This result motivated us to curate a new and challenging benchmark for these models. Therefore, we introduce a new benchmark that includes five real-world application-driven datasets, including challenging domains such as aerial and surgical images, and establish baselines. We exploit the inherent connection between classes in application-driven datasets and introduce a novel method, Foundation Object detection Model for the Open world, or FOMO, which identifies unknown objects based on their shared attributes with the base known objects. FOMO has ~3x unknown object mAP compared to baselines on our benchmark. However, our results indicate a significant place for improvement - suggesting a great research opportunity in further scaling object detection methods to real-world domains. Our code and benchmark are available at https://orrzohar.github.io/projects/fomo/.
ClassEval: A Manually-Crafted Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs on Class-level Code Generation
In this work, we make the first attempt to evaluate LLMs in a more challenging code generation scenario, i.e. class-level code generation. We first manually construct the first class-level code generation benchmark ClassEval of 100 class-level Python code generation tasks with approximately 500 person-hours. Based on it, we then perform the first study of 11 state-of-the-art LLMs on class-level code generation. Based on our results, we have the following main findings. First, we find that all existing LLMs show much worse performance on class-level code generation compared to on standalone method-level code generation benchmarks like HumanEval; and the method-level coding ability cannot equivalently reflect the class-level coding ability among LLMs. Second, we find that GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 still exhibit dominate superior than other LLMs on class-level code generation, and the second-tier models includes Instruct-Starcoder, Instruct-Codegen, and Wizardcoder with very similar performance. Third, we find that generating the entire class all at once (i.e. holistic generation strategy) is the best generation strategy only for GPT-4 and GPT-3.5, while method-by-method generation (i.e. incremental and compositional) is better strategies for the other models with limited ability of understanding long instructions and utilizing the middle information. Lastly, we find the limited model ability of generating method-dependent code and discuss the frequent error types in generated classes. Our benchmark is available at https://github.com/FudanSELab/ClassEval.
In or Out? Fixing ImageNet Out-of-Distribution Detection Evaluation
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is the problem of identifying inputs which are unrelated to the in-distribution task. The OOD detection performance when the in-distribution (ID) is ImageNet-1K is commonly being tested on a small range of test OOD datasets. We find that most of the currently used test OOD datasets, including datasets from the open set recognition (OSR) literature, have severe issues: In some cases more than 50% of the dataset contains objects belonging to one of the ID classes. These erroneous samples heavily distort the evaluation of OOD detectors. As a solution, we introduce with NINCO a novel test OOD dataset, each sample checked to be ID free, which with its fine-grained range of OOD classes allows for a detailed analysis of an OOD detector's strengths and failure modes, particularly when paired with a number of synthetic "OOD unit-tests". We provide detailed evaluations across a large set of architectures and OOD detection methods on NINCO and the unit-tests, revealing new insights about model weaknesses and the effects of pretraining on OOD detection performance. We provide code and data at https://github.com/j-cb/NINCO.
RepoMasterEval: Evaluating Code Completion via Real-World Repositories
With the growing reliance on automated code completion tools in software development, the need for robust evaluation benchmarks has become critical. However, existing benchmarks focus more on code generation tasks in function and class level and provide rich text description to prompt the model. By contrast, such descriptive prompt is commonly unavailable in real development and code completion can occur in wider range of situations such as in the middle of a function or a code block. These limitations makes the evaluation poorly align with the practical scenarios of code completion tools. In this paper, we propose RepoMasterEval, a novel benchmark for evaluating code completion models constructed from real-world Python and TypeScript repositories. Each benchmark datum is generated by masking a code snippet (ground truth) from one source code file with existing test suites. To improve test accuracy of model generated code, we employ mutation testing to measure the effectiveness of the test cases and we manually crafted new test cases for those test suites with low mutation score. Our empirical evaluation on 6 state-of-the-art models shows that test argumentation is critical in improving the accuracy of the benchmark and RepoMasterEval is able to report difference in model performance in real-world scenarios. The deployment of RepoMasterEval in a collaborated company for one month also revealed that the benchmark is useful to give accurate feedback during model training and the score is in high correlation with the model's performance in practice. Based on our findings, we call for the software engineering community to build more LLM benchmarks tailored for code generation tools taking the practical and complex development environment into consideration.
Benchmarking Neural Network Training Algorithms
Training algorithms, broadly construed, are an essential part of every deep learning pipeline. Training algorithm improvements that speed up training across a wide variety of workloads (e.g., better update rules, tuning protocols, learning rate schedules, or data selection schemes) could save time, save computational resources, and lead to better, more accurate, models. Unfortunately, as a community, we are currently unable to reliably identify training algorithm improvements, or even determine the state-of-the-art training algorithm. In this work, using concrete experiments, we argue that real progress in speeding up training requires new benchmarks that resolve three basic challenges faced by empirical comparisons of training algorithms: (1) how to decide when training is complete and precisely measure training time, (2) how to handle the sensitivity of measurements to exact workload details, and (3) how to fairly compare algorithms that require hyperparameter tuning. In order to address these challenges, we introduce a new, competitive, time-to-result benchmark using multiple workloads running on fixed hardware, the AlgoPerf: Training Algorithms benchmark. Our benchmark includes a set of workload variants that make it possible to detect benchmark submissions that are more robust to workload changes than current widely-used methods. Finally, we evaluate baseline submissions constructed using various optimizers that represent current practice, as well as other optimizers that have recently received attention in the literature. These baseline results collectively demonstrate the feasibility of our benchmark, show that non-trivial gaps between methods exist, and set a provisional state-of-the-art for future benchmark submissions to try and surpass.
McEval: Massively Multilingual Code Evaluation
Code large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable advances in code understanding, completion, and generation tasks. Programming benchmarks, comprised of a selection of code challenges and corresponding test cases, serve as a standard to evaluate the capability of different LLMs in such tasks. However, most existing benchmarks primarily focus on Python and are still restricted to a limited number of languages, where other languages are translated from the Python samples (e.g. MultiPL-E) degrading the data diversity. To further facilitate the research of code LLMs, we propose a massively multilingual code benchmark covering 40 programming languages (McEval) with 16K test samples, which substantially pushes the limits of code LLMs in multilingual scenarios. The benchmark contains challenging code completion, understanding, and generation evaluation tasks with finely curated massively multilingual instruction corpora McEval-Instruct. In addition, we introduce an effective multilingual coder mCoder trained on McEval-Instruct to support multilingual programming language generation. Extensive experimental results on McEval show that there is still a difficult journey between open-source models and closed-source LLMs (e.g. GPT-series models) in numerous languages. The instruction corpora, evaluation benchmark, and leaderboard are available at https://mceval.github.io/.
