Feature Bank Enhancement for Distance-based Out-of-Distribution Detection

Abstract

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is critical to ensuring the reliability of deep learning applications and has attracted significant attention in recent years. A rich body of literature has emerged to develop efficient score functions that assign high scores to in-distribution (ID) samples and low scores to OOD samples, thereby helping distinguish OOD samples. Among these methods, distance-based score functions are widely used because of their efficiency and ease of use. However, deep learning often leads to a biased distribution of data features, and extreme features are inevitable. These extreme features make the distance-based methods tend to assign too low scores to ID samples. This limits the OOD detection capabilities of such methods. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet effective method, Feature Bank Enhancement (FBE), that uses statistical characteristics from dataset to identify and constrain extreme features to the separation boundaries, therapy making the distance between samples inside and outside the distribution farther. We conducted experiments on large-scale ImageNet-1k and CIFAR-10 respectively, and the results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both benchmark. Additionally, theoretical analysis and supplementary experiments are conducted to provide more insights into our method.