Out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization is a complicated problem due to the idiosyncrasies of possible distribution shifts between training and test domains. Most benchmarks employ diverse datasets to address this issue; however, the degree of the distribution shift between the training domains and the test domains of each dataset remains largely fixed. This may lead to biased conclusions that either underestimate or overestimate the actual OOD performance of a model. Our study delves into a more nuanced evaluation setting that covers a broad range of shift degrees. We show that the robustness of models can be quite brittle and inconsistent under different degrees of distribution shifts, and therefore one should be more cautious when drawing conclusions from evaluations under a limited range of degrees. In addition, we observe that large-scale pre-trained models, such as CLIP, are sensitive to even minute distribution shifts of novel downstream tasks. This indicates that while pre-trained representations may help improve downstream in-distribution performance, they could have minimal or even adverse effects on generalization in certain OOD scenarios of the downstream task if not used properly. In light of these findings, we encourage future research to conduct evaluations across a broader range of shift degrees whenever possible.

我们的研究探讨了分布偏移程度的更加微妙的评估设置，我们发现模型的稳健性在不同程度的分布偏移下可能相当脆弱和不一致，因此在从有限范围下的评估中得出结论时应更加谨慎。此外，我们观察到大规模预训练模型（如CLIP）对于新颖下游任务的微小分布偏移也很敏感。这表明，尽管预训练表示可以帮助提高内分布性能，但在某些OOD场景中可能对泛化性能产生最小甚至负面影响，如果不正确使用。鉴于这些发现，我们鼓励未来的研究在可能的情况下进行更广泛范围的评估。

在不同程度的分布偏移下，鲁棒性可能比我们认为的更脆弱