Out-of-Distribution Learning with Human Feedback

Published: 25 Apr 2025, Last Modified: 25 Apr 2025Accepted by TMLREveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Abstract: Out-of-distribution (OOD) learning often relies on strong statistical assumptions or predefined OOD data distributions, limiting its effectiveness in real-world deployment for both OOD generalization and detection, especially when human inspection is minimal. This paper introduces a novel framework for OOD learning that integrates human feedback to enhance model adaptation and reliability. Our approach leverages freely available unlabeled data in the wild, which naturally captures environmental test-time OOD distributions under both covariate and semantic shifts. To effectively utilize such data, we propose selectively acquiring human feedback to label a small subset of informative samples. These labeled samples are then used to train both a multi-class classifier and an OOD detector. By incorporating human feedback, our method significantly improves model robustness and precision in handling OOD scenarios. We provide theoretical insights by establishing generalization error bounds for our algorithm. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/HaoyueBaiZJU/ood-hf.
Submission Length: Regular submission (no more than 12 pages of main content)
Assigned Action Editor: ~Ying_Wei1
Submission Number: 3222
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