Plugin estimators for selective classification with out-of-distribution detection
This work addresses the need for unified methods in machine learning to handle abstention on uncertain or outlier samples, though it appears incremental by building on prior selective classification and OOD detection literature.
The paper tackles the problem of selective classification with out-of-distribution detection by proposing new plugin estimators that are theoretically grounded and generalize existing approaches, showing competitive performance in empirical evaluations.
Real-world classifiers can benefit from the option of abstaining from predicting on samples where they have low confidence. Such abstention is particularly useful on samples which are close to the learned decision boundary, or which are outliers with respect to the training sample. These settings have been the subject of extensive but disjoint study in the selective classification (SC) and out-of-distribution (OOD) detection literature. Recent work on selective classification with OOD detection (SCOD) has argued for the unified study of these problems; however, the formal underpinnings of this problem are still nascent, and existing techniques are heuristic in nature. In this paper, we propose new plugin estimators for SCOD that are theoretically grounded, effective, and generalise existing approaches from the SC and OOD detection literature. In the course of our analysis, we formally explicate how naïve use of existing SC and OOD detection baselines may be inadequate for SCOD. We empirically demonstrate that our approaches yields competitive SC and OOD detection performance compared to baselines from both literatures.