Activation Matters: Test-time Activated Negative Labels for OOD Detection with Vision-Language Models

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection aims to identify samples that deviate from in-distribution (ID). One popular pipeline addresses this by introducing negative labels distant from ID classes and detecting OOD based on their distance to these labels. However, such labels may present poor activation on OOD samples, failing to capture the OOD characteristics. To address this, we propose Test-time Activated Negative Labels (TANL) by dynamically evaluating activation levels across the corpus dataset and mining candidate labels with high activation responses during the testing process. Specifically, TANL identifies high-confidence test images online and accumulates their assignment probabilities over the corpus to construct a label activation metric. Such a metric leverages historical test samples to adaptively align with the test distribution, enabling the selection of distribution-adaptive activated negative labels. By further exploring the activation information within the current testing batch, we introduce a more fine-grained, batch-adaptive variant. To fully utilize label activation knowledge, we propose an activation-aware score function that emphasizes negative labels with stronger activations, boosting performance and enhancing its robustness to the label number. Our TANL is training-free, test-efficient, and grounded in theoretical justification. Experiments on diverse backbones and wide task settings validate its effectiveness. Notably, on the large-scale ImageNet benchmark, TANL significantly reduces the FPR95 from 17.5% to 9.8%. Codes are available at YBZh/OpenOOD-VLM.