Open-Set Domain Adaptation Under Background Distribution Shift: Challenges and A Provably Efficient Solution

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Chaudhari, Shravan, Wald, Yoav, Saria, Suchi
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866910233590235136
author Chaudhari, Shravan
Wald, Yoav
Saria, Suchi
author_facet Chaudhari, Shravan
Wald, Yoav
Saria, Suchi
contents As we deploy machine learning systems in the real world, a core challenge is to maintain a model that is performant even as the data shifts. Such shifts can take many forms: new classes may emerge that were absent during training, a problem known as open-set recognition, and the distribution of known categories may change. Guarantees on open-set recognition are mostly derived under the assumption that the distribution of known classes, which we call the background distribution, is fixed. In this paper we develop CoLOR, a method that is guaranteed to solve open-set recognition even in the challenging case where the background distribution shifts. We prove that the method works under benign assumptions that the novel class is separable from the non-novel classes, and provide theoretical guarantees that it outperforms a representative baseline in a simplified overparameterized setting. We develop techniques to make CoLOR scalable and robust, and perform comprehensive empirical evaluations on image and text data. The results show that CoLOR significantly outperforms existing open-set recognition methods under background shift. Moreover, we provide new insights into how factors such as the size of the novel class influences performance, an aspect that has not been extensively explored in prior work.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_01152
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Open-Set Domain Adaptation Under Background Distribution Shift: Challenges and A Provably Efficient Solution
Chaudhari, Shravan
Wald, Yoav
Saria, Suchi
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
As we deploy machine learning systems in the real world, a core challenge is to maintain a model that is performant even as the data shifts. Such shifts can take many forms: new classes may emerge that were absent during training, a problem known as open-set recognition, and the distribution of known categories may change. Guarantees on open-set recognition are mostly derived under the assumption that the distribution of known classes, which we call the background distribution, is fixed. In this paper we develop CoLOR, a method that is guaranteed to solve open-set recognition even in the challenging case where the background distribution shifts. We prove that the method works under benign assumptions that the novel class is separable from the non-novel classes, and provide theoretical guarantees that it outperforms a representative baseline in a simplified overparameterized setting. We develop techniques to make CoLOR scalable and robust, and perform comprehensive empirical evaluations on image and text data. The results show that CoLOR significantly outperforms existing open-set recognition methods under background shift. Moreover, we provide new insights into how factors such as the size of the novel class influences performance, an aspect that has not been extensively explored in prior work.
title Open-Set Domain Adaptation Under Background Distribution Shift: Challenges and A Provably Efficient Solution
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01152