A Critical Analysis of Distribution Shift

Dan Hendrycks, Steven Basart, Norman Mu, Saurav Kadavath, Frank Wang, Evan Dorundo, Rahul Desai, Tyler Zhu, Samyak Parajuli, Mike Guo, Dawn Song, Jacob Steinhardt, Justin Gilmer

Keywords: distribution shift, ood

Abstract: We introduce three new robustness benchmarks consisting of naturally occurring distribution changes in image style, geographic location, camera operation, and more. Using our benchmarks, we take stock of previously proposed hypotheses for out-of-distribution robustness and put them to the test. We find that using larger models and synthetic data augmentation can improve robustness on real-world distribution shifts, contrary to claims in prior work. Motivated by this, we introduce a new data augmentation method which advances the state-of-the-art and outperforms models pretrained with 1000x more labeled data. We find that some methods consistently help with distribution shifts in texture and local image statistics, but these methods do not help with some other distribution shifts like geographic changes. Hence no evaluated method consistently improves robustness. We conclude that future research should study multiple distribution shifts simultaneously.

One-sentence Summary: We assess which techniques can help with robustness to distribution shift, and we find that none consistently help.

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