Beyond Retraining: Training-Free Unknown Class Filtering for Source-Free Open Set Domain Adaptation of Vision-Language Models

Abstract

Vision-language models (VLMs) have gained widespread attention for their strong zero-shot capabilities across numerous downstream tasks. However, these models assume that each test image's class label is drawn from a predefined label set and lack a reliable mechanism to reject samples from emerging unknown classes when only unlabeled data are available. To address this gap, open-set domain adaptation methods retrain models to push potential unknowns away from known clusters. Yet, some unknown samples remain stably anchored to specific known classes in the VLM feature space due to semantic relevance, which is termed as Semantic Affinity Anchoring (SAA). Forcibly repelling these samples unavoidably distorts the native geometry of VLMs and degrades performance. Meanwhile, existing score-based unknown detectors use simplistic thresholds and suffer from threshold sensitivity, resulting in sub-optimal performance. To address aforementioned issues, we propose VLM-OpenXpert, which comprises two training-free, plug-and-play inference modules. SUFF performs SVD on high-confidence unknowns to extract a low-rank "unknown subspace". Each sample's projection onto this subspace is weighted and softly removed from its feature, suppressing unknown components while preserving semantics. BGAT corrects score skewness via a Box-Cox transform, then fits a bimodal Gaussian mixture to adaptively estimate the optimal threshold balancing known-class recognition and unknown-class rejection. Experiments on 9 benchmarks and three backbones (CLIP, SigLIP, ALIGN) under source-free OSDA settings show that our training-free pipeline matches or outperforms retraining-heavy state-of-the-art methods, establishing a powerful lightweight inference calibration paradigm for open-set VLM deployment.