Multi-Class Data Description for Out-of-distribution Detection
This addresses the challenge of reliable OOD detection for deploying classifiers in real-world applications where test distributions often differ from training.
The paper tackled the problem of detecting out-of-distribution samples in classifiers by proposing Deep-MCDD, which uses spherical decision boundaries and Gaussian distributions, achieving the best performance in OOD detection while maintaining competitive classification accuracy.
The capability of reliably detecting out-of-distribution samples is one of the key factors in deploying a good classifier, as the test distribution always does not match with the training distribution in most real-world applications. In this work, we present a deep multi-class data description, termed as Deep-MCDD, which is effective to detect out-of-distribution (OOD) samples as well as classify in-distribution (ID) samples. Unlike the softmax classifier that only focuses on the linear decision boundary partitioning its latent space into multiple regions, our Deep-MCDD aims to find a spherical decision boundary for each class which determines whether a test sample belongs to the class or not. By integrating the concept of Gaussian discriminant analysis into deep neural networks, we propose a deep learning objective to learn class-conditional distributions that are explicitly modeled as separable Gaussian distributions. Thereby, we can define the confidence score by the distance of a test sample from each class-conditional distribution, and utilize it for identifying OOD samples. Our empirical evaluation on multi-class tabular and image datasets demonstrates that Deep-MCDD achieves the best performances in distinguishing OOD samples while showing the classification accuracy as high as the other competitors.