Beyond the Class Subspace: Teacher-Guided Training for Reliable Out-of-Distribution Detection in Single-Domain Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yang, Hong, Kar, Devroop, Yu, Qi, Desell, Travis, Ororbia, Alex
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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_version_ 1866915855114174464
author Yang, Hong
Kar, Devroop
Yu, Qi
Desell, Travis
Ororbia, Alex
author_facet Yang, Hong
Kar, Devroop
Yu, Qi
Desell, Travis
Ororbia, Alex
contents Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection methods perform well on multi-domain benchmarks, yet many practical systems are trained on single-domain data. We show that this regime induces a geometric failure mode, Domain-Sensitivity Collapse (DSC): supervised training compresses features into a low-rank class subspace and suppresses directions that carry domain-shift signal. We provide theory showing that, under DSC, distance- and logit-based OOD scores lose sensitivity to domain shift. We then introduce Teacher-Guided Training (TGT), which distills class-suppressed residual structure from a frozen multi-domain teacher (DINOv2) into the student during training. The teacher and auxiliary head are discarded after training, adding no inference overhead. Across eight single-domain benchmarks, TGT yields large far-OOD FPR@95 reductions for distance-based scorers: MDS improves by 11.61 pp, ViM by 10.78 pp, and kNN by 12.87 pp (ResNet-50 average), while maintaining or slightly improving in-domain OOD and classification accuracy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_11269
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond the Class Subspace: Teacher-Guided Training for Reliable Out-of-Distribution Detection in Single-Domain Models
Yang, Hong
Kar, Devroop
Yu, Qi
Desell, Travis
Ororbia, Alex
Machine Learning
68T07
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection methods perform well on multi-domain benchmarks, yet many practical systems are trained on single-domain data. We show that this regime induces a geometric failure mode, Domain-Sensitivity Collapse (DSC): supervised training compresses features into a low-rank class subspace and suppresses directions that carry domain-shift signal. We provide theory showing that, under DSC, distance- and logit-based OOD scores lose sensitivity to domain shift. We then introduce Teacher-Guided Training (TGT), which distills class-suppressed residual structure from a frozen multi-domain teacher (DINOv2) into the student during training. The teacher and auxiliary head are discarded after training, adding no inference overhead. Across eight single-domain benchmarks, TGT yields large far-OOD FPR@95 reductions for distance-based scorers: MDS improves by 11.61 pp, ViM by 10.78 pp, and kNN by 12.87 pp (ResNet-50 average), while maintaining or slightly improving in-domain OOD and classification accuracy.
title Beyond the Class Subspace: Teacher-Guided Training for Reliable Out-of-Distribution Detection in Single-Domain Models
topic Machine Learning
68T07
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11269