CSI: Novelty Detection via Contrastive Learning on Distributionally Shifted Instances
This addresses the problem of reliable novelty detection for machine learning systems, representing an incremental improvement over existing contrastive learning methods.
The paper tackles novelty detection by proposing a contrastive learning method that contrasts samples with distributionally-shifted augmentations of themselves, achieving superior performance across various settings and image benchmarks.
Novelty detection, i.e., identifying whether a given sample is drawn from outside the training distribution, is essential for reliable machine learning. To this end, there have been many attempts at learning a representation well-suited for novelty detection and designing a score based on such representation. In this paper, we propose a simple, yet effective method named contrasting shifted instances (CSI), inspired by the recent success on contrastive learning of visual representations. Specifically, in addition to contrasting a given sample with other instances as in conventional contrastive learning methods, our training scheme contrasts the sample with distributionally-shifted augmentations of itself. Based on this, we propose a new detection score that is specific to the proposed training scheme. Our experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method under various novelty detection scenarios, including unlabeled one-class, unlabeled multi-class and labeled multi-class settings, with various image benchmark datasets. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/alinlab/CSI.