Unsupervised Domain Shift Detection with Interpretable Subspace Attribution
Authors: Sebastian Springer, Alessandro Laio
Summary
arXiv:2605. 15920v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We developed a tool for detecting domain shifts, namely subtle differences in the probability distributions of datasets.
Relevance
Read next because Unsupervised Domain Shift Detection with Interpretable Subspace Attribution overlaps with clean result "Only continuous soft prefixes hit both EM axes at once on Qwen-2.5-7B-Instruct: discrete prompt searches split between the alignment objective and the distributional objective, and both discretizations of the soft prefix collapse (MODERATE confidence)", experiment "Add C2 control arm (donor sees marker_B without marker_A) to disambiguate paired-marker binding from marker_B leaking alone", experiment "#351 follow-up: broader-vocab position-0 sweep at T=1.0 + position-1 suffix isolation". Matching terms: distributional, control, position, model. Source: arxiv stat.ML (Machine Learning).
Threat model
Potential threat/caveat for clean result "Only continuous soft prefixes hit both EM axes at once on Qwen-2.5-7B-Instruct: discrete prompt searches split between the alignment objective and the distributional objective, and both discretizations of the soft prefix collapse (MODERATE confidence)": this item discusses bias, benchmark.
Abstract
arXiv:2605.15920v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We developed a tool for detecting domain shifts, namely subtle differences in the probability distributions of datasets. We identify these shifts using an algorithm designed to detect localised density anomalies in high-dimensional feature spaces. If an anomaly is present, we then identify the feature subspace in which the anomaly is most pronounced. This allows us to trace the domain shift to a small set of features, making the shift interpretable. Moreover, we provide a protocol for compensating domain shifts by extracting, from two unlabelled datasets, subsets of samples with no detectable residual distributional difference. We validate the framework on controlled 20-dimensional benchmarks with known ground truth, recovering both broad and localized shifts together with their supporting feature subspaces. We then apply it to healthy electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings represented by 782 features. In age- and sex-matched cohort comparisons differing in measurement-device composition, the method detects device-induced shifts, extracts representative subsets enriched in the imbalanced device components, and identifies ECG features associated with the acquisition contrast. These results suggest that density-shift detection and subspace attribution provide a practical framework for uncovering hidden cohort biases before downstream modelling.