@inproceedings{duan-etal-2022-barle,
    title = "{BARLE}: Background-Aware Representation Learning for Background Shift Out-of-Distribution Detection",
    author = "Duan, Hanyu  and
      Yang, Yi  and
      Abbasi, Ahmed  and
      Tam, Kar Yan",
    editor = "Goldberg, Yoav  and
      Kozareva, Zornitsa  and
      Zhang, Yue",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022",
    month = dec,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2022.findings-emnlp.53/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.findings-emnlp.53",
    pages = "750--764",
    abstract = "Machine learning models often suffer from a performance drop when they are applied to out-of-distribution (OOD) samples, i.e., those drawn far away from the training data distribution. Existing OOD detection work mostly focuses on identifying semantic-shift OOD samples, e.g., instances from unseen new classes. However, background-shift OOD detection, which identifies samples with domain or style-change, represents a more practical yet challenging task. In this paper, we propose Background-Aware Representation Learning (BARLE) for background-shift OOD detection in NLP. Specifically, we generate semantics-preserving background-shifted pseudo OOD samples from pretrained masked language models. We then contrast the in-distribution (ID) samples with their pseudo OOD counterparts. Unlike prior semantic-shift OOD detection work that often leverages an external text corpus, BARLE only uses ID data, which is more flexible and cost-efficient. In experiments across several text classification tasks, we demonstrate that BARLE is capable of improving background-shift OOD detection performance while maintaining ID classification accuracy. We further investigate the properties of the generated pseudo OOD samples, uncovering the working mechanism of BARLE."
}