OODBench: Out-of-Distribution Benchmark for Large Vision-Language Models
Organizations: School of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230000, China · Suzhou Institute for Advanced Research, USTC, Suzhou 215123, China · Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC), A*STAR, Singapore · Unmanned System Research Institute, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an 71002, China
Abstract
Existing Visual-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved significant progress by being trained on massive-scale datasets, typically under the assumption that data are independent and identically distributed (IID). However, in real-world scenarios, it is often impractical to expect that all data processed by an AI system satisfy this assumption. Furthermore, failure to appropriately handle out-of-distribution (OOD) objects may introduce safety risks in real-world applications (e.g., autonomous driving or medical assistance). Unfortunately, current research has not yet provided valid benchmarks that can comprehensively assess the performance of VLMs in response to OOD data. Therefore, we propose OODBench, a predominantly automated method with minimal human verification, for constructing new benchmarks and evaluating the ability of VLMs to process OOD data. OODBench contains 40K instance-level OOD instance-category pairs, and we show that current VLMs still exhibit notable performance degradation on OODBench, even when the underlying image categories are common. In addition, we propose a reliable automated assessment metric that employs a Basic-to-Advanced Progression of prompted questions to assess the impact of OOD data on questions of varying difficulty more fully. Lastly, we summarize substantial findings and insights to facilitate future research in the acquisition and evaluation of OOD data.
Figures & tables
| Model | Image Encoder | Language Model | Data Type | OODBench Performance | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Accuracy( ) | F1( ) | Precision( ) | Recall( ) | MCC( ) | ||||
| Random Chance | - | - | ID/OOD-S/OOD-H | 50.00 | 50.00 | 50.00 | 50.00 | 0.00 |
| Open-source Models | ||||||||
| ID | 84.79 | 84.72 | 85.15 | 84.28 | 69.59 | |||
| OOD-S | 64.54 | 56.16 | 73.52 | 45.44 | 31.46 | |||
| OOD-H | 63.22 | 52.99 | 73.40 | 41.46 | 29.36 | |||
| Model | Data Type | OODBench BAP Performance | ||
| E-Acc( ) | C-Acc( ) | L-Acc( ) | ||
| ID | 81.39 | 38.25 | 21.70 | |
| OOD-S | 66.61 | 33.75 | 21.48 | |
| LLaVA-NeXT-8B | OOD-H | 44.22 | 21.71 | 13.45 |
| ID | 84.66 | 38.67 | 24.40 | |
| OOD-S | 69.73 | 26.72 | 17.50 | |
| Model | Scoring Models | COCO-OOD Performance | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Num | Accuracy( ) | F1( ) | Precision( ) | Recall( ) | MCC( ) | Time | ||
| Random Chance | - | - | - | |||||
| Open-source Models | ||||||||
| 10160 | 78.74 | 76.78 | 84.58 | 70.30 | 58.32 | 00:11:44 | ||
| CLIP & BLIP2 | + 0.00 | + 0.00 | + 0.00 | + 0.00 | + 0.00 | - | ||
| 9988 | 79.85 | 78.06 | 85.65 | 71.71 | 60.50 | 00:21:40 | ||
| Threshold T | Data Type | nuScenes Performance | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Num | Accuracy | F1 | Precision | Recall | MCC | ||
| OOD-S | 25798 | 66.30 | 63.34 | 69.43 | 58.24 | 33.02 | |
| 0.05 | OOD-H | 9882 | 58.86 | 60.28 | 58.28 | 62.42 | 17.77 |
| OOD-S | 23546 | 62.65 | 55.69 | 68.44 | 46.95 | 26.64 | |
| 0.01 | OOD-H | 5934 | 60.79 | 59.08 | 61.76 | 56.62 | 21.65 |
| OOD-S | 23644 | 60.93 | 53.31 | 66.24 | 44.60 | 23.13 | |
| Ling Lin is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree with the School of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). His research interests include multimodal large language models, out-of-distribution research, multimodal reasoning, and 3D scene understanding. He has published papers in several leading journals and conferences such as IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and learning systems, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, ICASSP, and ICME. |
| Yang Bai received the M.S. degree in computer science from Newcastle University, U.K., in 2018, and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from Durham University, U.K., in 2023. He is currently a Scientist at the Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC), A*STAR, Singapore. His research interests include multimodal foundation models, vision–language learning, and medical artificial intelligence, with a focus on medical image understanding and clinical multimodal reasoning. |
| Heng Su is currently pursuing a Master’s degree at the School of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). He received his Bachelor’s degree from China University of Petroleum (East China) (UPC). His research interests include Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), visual faithfulness, and spatial hallucination. |
| Yang Long (Senior Member, IEEE) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Durham University, U.K. He is also an MRC Innovation Fellow aiming to design scalable AI solutions for large-scale healthcare applications. His research background is in the interdisciplinary field of computer vision and machine learning. He is passionate about unveiling the black-box of AI and transferring the knowledge to seek scalable, interactable, interpretable, and sustainable solutions for other disciplinary researches, e.g., physical activity, mental health, design, education, security, and geoengineering. He has authored/coauthored 30+ top-tier papers in refereed journals/conferences such as IEEE TPAMI, TIP, CVPR, AAAI, and ACM MM, and holds a patent and a Chinese National Grant. |
| Congcong Zhu (Member, IEEE) received the Ph.D. degree from the School of Computer Engineering and Science, Shanghai University, Shanghai, China, in 2022. He is currently an Associate Researcher at the Suzhou Institute for Advanced Research, University of Science and Technology of China, Suzhou, China. His research interests include embodied artificial intelligence, multimodal content generation, and multimodal understanding. He has published papers in several journals, including IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, Pattern Recognition, and IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement, as well as in leading conferences, including ICML, CVPR, ICCV, AAAI, and ACM MM. He was nominated for the Shanghai Computer Society’s Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award, received the Outstanding Graduate Student Award of Shanghai, and was recognized as an Outstanding Postdoctoral Fellow in Jiangsu Province, China. |
| Yaoxing Wang received the master’s degree in computer technology from Ningxia University, Yinchuan, China, in 2022, where he is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in unmanned systems science and technology with the Unmanned System Research Institute, Northwestern Polytechnical University. His research interests include computer vision, 3D reconstruction, and thermography. |
| Yang Zhou is a Senior Scientist at the Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC), A*STAR, Singapore. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Hong Kong Baptist University in 2019. From 2020 to 2022, he served as a Research Fellow at the School of Computing, National University of Singapore. His research interests span medical foundation models, vision-language modeling, probabilistic modeling, tensor analysis, natural language processing, and machine learning. |
| Ling Shao (Fellow, IEEE) is a Distinguished Professor with the UCAS-Terminus AI Lab, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China. He was the founder of the Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence (IIAI) and the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), Abu Dhabi, UAE. His research interests include generative AI, vision and language, and AI for healthcare. He is a fellow of the IEEE, the IAPR, the BCS and the IET. |
| Huazhu Fu (Senior Member, IEEE) is a Principal Scientist at the Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC), A*STAR, Singapore. He earned his Ph.D. from Tianjin University in 2013. His research focuses on medical image analysis, AI for healthcare, and trustworthy AI. He is an Associate Editor for several distinguished journals, including IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, and IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics. |
| Jingrun Chen received the B.S. degree from Nanjing University, China, in 2005, and the PhD degree from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, in 2010. From 2010 to 2015, he served as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and from 2015 to 2021, he was a Distinguished Professor at Soochow University. He is currently a Professor at the Suzhou Institute for Advanced Research/School of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Science and Technology of China. His main work has been published in academic journals on applied and computational mathematics such as the SIAM series, Mathematics of Computation, and Journal of Computational Physics, as well as in interdisciplinary academic journals like Nature Communications and Materials Horizons. |
Appendix figures & tables29 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Original Labels | Modified Labels | Remark |
|---|---|---|
| human.pedestrian.adult | Adult Pedestrian | |
| human.pedestrian.child | Child Pedestrian | |
| human.pedestrian.wheelchair | Pedestrian in Wheelchair | |
| human.pedestrian.stroller | Pedestrian with Stroller | |
| human.pedestrian.personal_mobility | Pedestrian using Personal Mobility Device | |
| human.pedestrian.police_officer | Police Officer |
| Original Labels | Modified Labels | Remark |
|---|---|---|
| road | road | |
| sidewalk | sidewalk | |
| parking | parking | |
| rail track | rail track | |
| person | person | |
| rider | rider |
| Level | Name | Weights | Architecture | Training Code | Training Data | Reproducibility |
| 0 | Non-Open Source | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| 1A | Architecture Open Source | ✗ | ✓ | Partial | ✗ | ✗ |
| 1B | Weights Open but Architecture Not Fully Open | ✓ | Partial | Partial | ✗ | ✗ |
| 1C | Data Partially Open | Optional | Optional | Optional | Partial | ✗ |
| 2 | Weights Open | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ / Rough | ✓ (Partial) |
| 3 | Strongly Open (Reproducible) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ (Clean) | ✓ (Partial) |
| No. | Family | Years | Models | Institution | COCO Used | Openness Level | Included in Analysis |
| 1 | Flamingo [ 44 ] | 2022 | Flamingo-3B, Flamingo-9B | DeepMind | ✗ | L3 | ✗ |
| 2 | Qwen-VL [ 45 ] | 2023 | Qwen-VL(7B), Qwen-VL-Chat(7B), Qwen-VL-Plus(7B), Qwen-VL-Max(7B) | Alibaba Group | ✓ | L3 | ✓ |
| 3 | PaLI-X [ 46 ] | 2023 | PaLI-X(55B) | Google Research | ✗ | L1C | ✗ |
| 4 | LLaVA-v1 [ 47 ] | 2023 | LLaVA-v1-Vicuna(13B), LLaVA-v1-LLama(13B), LLaVA-v1-LLama(7B) | UW-Madison | ✓ | L3 | ✓ |
| 5 | InstructBLIP [ 48 ] | 2023 | InstructBLIP (FlanT5XL)(3B), InstructBLIP (FlanT5XXL)(11B), InstructBLIP (Vicuna-7B), InstructBLIP (Vicuna-13B) | Salesforce Research | ✓ | L3 | ✓ |
| 6 | MiniGPT-4 [ 49 ] | 2023 | MiniGPT-4 (Vicuna 13B), MiniGPT-4 (Vicuna 7B), MiniGPT-4 (LLaMA-2 Chat 7B), | KAUST | ✗ | L3 | ✗ |
| Model | Data Type | COCO-OOD-Hard Sample Performance | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Num | Accuracy( ) | F1( ) | Precision( ) | Recall( ) | MCC( | ||
| Random Chance | - | - | |||||
| Open-source Models | |||||||
| ID | 6000 | 89.90 | 90.17 | 87.83 | 92.63 | 79.92 | |
| OOD-H | 6000 | 74.45 | 69.53 | 86.12 | 58.30 | 51.67 | |
| LLaVA-NeXT-8B | Hard Sample | 5282 | 56.74 | 30.27 | 77.99 | 18.78 | 20.71 |
| Model | Image Encoder | Language Model | Data Type | COCO-ID-OOD Performance | ||||||
| Num | Accuracy( ) | F1( ) | Precision( ) | Recall( ) | MCC( ) | Time | ||||
| Random Chance | - | - | ID/OOD-S/OOD-H | - | - | |||||
| Open-source Models | ||||||||||
| ID | 6000 | 89.90 | 90.17 | 87.83 | 92.63 | 79.92 | 00:24:24 | |||
| OOD-S | 6000 | 74.32 | 70.26 | 83.45 | 60.67 | 50.55 | 00:27:16 | |||
| OOD-H | 6000 | 74.45 | 69.53 | 86.12 | 58.30 | 51.67 | 00:23:49 | |||
| Model | Image Encoder | Language Model | Data Type | LVIS-ID-OOD Performance | ||||||
| Num | Accuracy( ) | F1( ) | Precision( ) | Recall( ) | MCC( ) | Time | ||||
| Random Chance | - | - | ID/OOD-S/OOD-H | - | - | |||||
| Open-source Models | ||||||||||
| ID | 6000 | 85.17 | 85.06 | 85.67 | 84.47 | 70.34 | 00:24:54 | |||
| OOD-S | 6000 | 47.90 | 35.20 | 46.55 | 28.30 | -4.57 | 00:29:54 | |||
| OOD-H | 2436 | 40.23 | 30.86 | 36.60 | 26.68 | -20.30 | 00:10:45 | |||
| Model | Image Encoder | Language Model | Data Type | nuScenes-ID-OOD Performance | ||||||
| Num | Accuracy( ) | F1( ) | Precision( ) | Recall( ) | MCC( ) | Time | ||||
| Random Chance | - | - | ID/OOD-S/OOD-H | - | - | |||||
| Open-source Models | ||||||||||
| ID | 6000 | 81.43 | 80.05 | 86.49 | 74.50 | 63.48 | 00:27:02 | |||
| OOD-S | 6000 | 62.68 | 45.38 | 84.62 | 31.00 | 32.79 | 00:31:30 | |||
| OOD-H | 6000 | 59.03 | 40.34 | 74.20 | 27.70 | 23.18 | 00:30:31 | |||
| Model | Image Encoder | Language Model | Data Type | Cityscapes-ID-OOD Performance | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Num | Accuracy( ) | F1( ) | Precision( ) | Recall( ) | MCC( ) | Time | ||||
| Random Chance | - | - | ID/OOD-S/OOD-H | - | - | |||||
| Open-source Models | ||||||||||
| ID | 3556 | 81.21 | 82.14 | 78.29 | 86.39 | 62.77 | 00:18:39 | |||
| OOD-S | 3820 | 78.22 | 76.55 | 82.91 | 71.10 | 57.02 | 00:17:43 | |||
| OOD-H | 3836 | 66.79 | 58.09 | 78.70 | 46.04 | 36.90 | 00:18:58 | |||
| Model | Data Type | COCO BAP Performance | |||
| E-Acc( ) | C-Acc( ) | L-Acc( ) | Time | ||
| ID | 88.04 | 61.72 | 37.08 | 00:03:48 | |
| OOD-S | 79.98 | 47.40 | 33.23 | 00:10:14 | |
| LLaVA-NeXT-8B | OOD-H | 55.85 | 33.83 | 21.10 | 00:09:47 |
| ID | 91.39 | 58.61 | 44.26 | 00:02:58 | |
| OOD-S | 80.30 | 36.26 | 27.81 | 00:06:47 | |
| Model | Data Type | LVIS BAP Performance | |||
| E-Acc( ) | C-Acc( ) | L-Acc( ) | Time | ||
| ID | 81.27 | 52.07 | 29.84 | 00:07:14 | |
| OOD-S | 49.04 | 35.01 | 17.39 | 00:10:15 | |
| LLaVA-NeXT-8B | OOD-H | 31.25 | 27.73 | 14.06 | 00:02:45 |
| ID | 90.44 | 55.04 | 39.79 | 00:05:38 | |
| OOD-S | 53.36 | 22.66 | 16.19 | 00:06:24 | |
| Model | Data Type | nuScenes BAP Performance | |||
| E-Acc( ) | C-Acc( ) | L-Acc( ) | Time | ||
| ID | 68.31 | 21.38 | 15.54 | 00:08:03 | |
| OOD-S | 65.15 | 40.88 | 28.65 | 00:07:10 | |
| LLaVA-NeXT-8B | OOD-H | 35.10 | 20.65 | 13.27 | 00:08:46 |
| ID | 68.46 | 30.77 | 13.08 | 00:05:05 | |
| OOD-S | 59.85 | 34.67 | 19.89 | 00:04:29 | |
| Model | Data Type | Cityscapes BAP Performance | |||
| E-Acc( ) | C-Acc( ) | L-Acc( ) | Time | ||
| ID | 87.37 | 28.44 | 12.73 | 00:11:48 | |
| OOD-S | 69.53 | 17.17 | 10.75 | 00:13:41 | |
| LLaVA-NeXT-8B | OOD-H | 43.62 | 10.86 | 7.05 | 00:12:38 |
| ID | 87.99 | 22.38 | 11.19 | 00:08:56 | |
| OOD-S | 70.19 | 15.19 | 8.21 | 00:09:51 | |
| Model | Data Type | OODBench Performance | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Num | Accuracy(%) | F1(%) | Precision(%) | Recall(%) | MCC(%) | ||
| Random Chance | - | - | 50.00 | 50.00 | 50.00 | 50.00 | 0.00 |
| COCO | |||||||
| Qwen2-VL-2B | OOD-S | 6000 | 78.78 | 74.62 | 92.85 | 62.37 | 60.95 |
| OOD-H | 6000 | 80.63 | 76.53 | 97.13 | 63.13 | 65.40 | |
| OOD-S’ | 7972 | 78.84 | 74.61 | 93.23 | 62.19 | 61.17 | |
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