Tail of Distribution GAN (TailGAN): Generative-Adversarial-Network-Based Boundary Formation
This addresses anomaly detection for applications like security screening, but it is incremental as it builds on existing GAN methods.
The paper tackled the problem of detecting anomalies near the tail of a distribution by developing TailGAN, a GAN-based model that generates boundary samples and achieves competitive performance on datasets like MNIST and CIFAR-10.
Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) are a powerful methodology and can be used for unsupervised anomaly detection, where current techniques have limitations such as the accurate detection of anomalies near the tail of a distribution. GANs generally do not guarantee the existence of a probability density and are susceptible to mode collapse, while few GANs use likelihood to reduce mode collapse. In this paper, we create a GAN-based tail formation model for anomaly detection, the Tail of distribution GAN (TailGAN), to generate samples on the tail of the data distribution and detect anomalies near the support boundary. Using TailGAN, we leverage GANs for anomaly detection and use maximum entropy regularization. Using GANs that learn the probability of the underlying distribution has advantages in improving the anomaly detection methodology by allowing us to devise a generator for boundary samples, and use this model to characterize anomalies. TailGAN addresses supports with disjoint components and achieves competitive performance on images. We evaluate TailGAN for identifying Out-of-Distribution (OoD) data and its performance evaluated on MNIST, CIFAR-10, Baggage X-Ray, and OoD data shows competitiveness compared to methods from the literature.