ID and OODPerformance Are Sometimes Inversely Correlated on Real-world Datasets

Several studies have compared the in-distribution (ID) and out-ofdistribution (OOD) performance of models in computer vision and NLP. They report a frequent positive correlation, but surprisingly, almost never an inverse correlation that would be indicative of a necessary trade-off. Such inverse patterns are possible theoretically, and their occurrence in practice is important to determine whether ID performance can serve as a proxy for OOD generalization.