Exploring the Design of Adaptation Protocols for Improved Generalization and Machine Learning Safety

While directly fine-tuning large-scale, pretrained models on task-specific data is well-known to induce strong in-distribution task performance, recent works have demonstrated that different adaptation protocols, such as linear probing before fine-tuning, can improve OOD generalization. However, the design space of such adaptation protocols remains under-explored and the evaluation of such protocols has primarily focused on distribution shifts. Therefore, in this work, we evaluate common adaptation protocols across distributions shifts and machine learning safety metrics (e.g., anomaly detection, calibration). We find that protocols induce disparate trade-offs that were not apparent from prior evaluation. Finally, we demonstrate that appropriate pairing of data augmentation and protocol can substantially mitigate this trade-off.