ReMaD: Tuning-free Domain Adaptation for Classification and Out-of-Distribution Detection

arXiv:2610.05718v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce Reduced-rank Mahalanobis Distance (ReMaD), a novel prototypical distance-based refinement to classification and out-of-distribution (OOD) detection using pretrained models without finetuning. We use embeddings of the target dataset to fit closed-form distribution statistics in the model's latent space which can classify in-distribution samples and detect OOD samples, all without training or prior knowledge of the OOD data. Building on prototype classification and OOD detection, we analyze the distribution properties of large pretrained models when processing new datasets; based on this analysis, we formulate a simple modification to Mahalanobis Distance to adapt models' latent space distributions to new domains by removing unused features, without the finetuning or hyperparameter searches required by other adaptation procedures. We demonstrate the efficacy of this method to adapt existing large pretrained image embedding models to new classification domains outside their trained capabilities by testing across four target datasets, with competitive performance in both classification and OOD detection.