Contrastive Language-Image Pretrained (CLIP) Models are Powerful Out-of-Distribution Detectors

Abstract

We present a comprehensive experimental study on pretrained feature extractors for visual out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. We examine several setups, based on the availability of labels or image captions and using different combinations of in- and out-distributions. Intriguingly, we find that (i) contrastive language-image pretrained models achieve state-of-the-art unsupervised out-of-distribution performance using nearest neighbors feature similarity as the OOD detection score, (ii) supervised state-of-the-art OOD detection performance can be obtained without in-distribution fine-tuning, (iii) even top-performing billion-scale vision transformers trained with natural language supervision fail at detecting adversarially manipulated OOD images. Finally, we argue whether new benchmarks for visual anomaly detection are needed based on our experiments. Using the largest publicly available vision transformer, we achieve state-of-the-art performance across all $18$ reported OOD benchmarks, including an AUROC of 87.6\% (9.2\% gain, unsupervised) and 97.4\% (1.2\% gain, supervised) for the challenging task of CIFAR100 $\rightarrow$ CIFAR10 OOD detection. The code will be open-sourced