EPA: Neural Collapse Inspired Robust Out-of-Distribution Detector
It addresses security for neural networks by improving OOD detection, but appears incremental as it builds on existing subspace methods.
The paper tackled out-of-distribution detection by proposing a novel scoring function based on neural collapse, achieving state-of-the-art performance with superior robustness across architectures and datasets.
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection plays a crucial role in ensuring the security of neural networks. Existing works have leveraged the fact that In-distribution (ID) samples form a subspace in the feature space, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. However, the comprehensive characteristics of the ID subspace still leave under-explored. Recently, the discovery of Neural Collapse ($\mathcal{NC}$) sheds light on novel properties of the ID subspace. Leveraging insight from $\mathcal{NC}$, we observe that the Principal Angle between the features and the ID feature subspace forms a superior representation for measuring the likelihood of OOD. Building upon this observation, we propose a novel $\mathcal{NC}$-inspired OOD scoring function, named Entropy-enhanced Principal Angle (EPA), which integrates both the global characteristic of the ID subspace and its inner property. We experimentally compare EPA with various SOTA approaches, validating its superior performance and robustness across different network architectures and OOD datasets.