Detecting Out-of-Distribution through the Lens of Neural Collapse

Litian Liu, Yao Qin

Keywords: Out-of-Distribution Detection

Abstract: Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection is essential for safe deployment; however, existing detectors exhibit generalization discrepancies and cost concerns. To address this, we propose a highly versatile and efficient OOD detector inspired by the trend of Neural Collapse on practical models, without requiring complete collapse. By analyzing this trend, we discover that features of in-distribution (ID) samples cluster closer to the weight vectors compared to features of OOD samples. Additionally, we reveal that ID features tend to expand in space to structure a simplex Equiangular Tight Framework, which explains the prevalent observation that ID features reside further from the origin than OOD features. Taking both insights from Neural Collapse into consideration, our OOD detector utilizes feature proximity to weight vectors and further complements this perspective by using feature norms to filter OOD samples. Extensive experiments on \emph{off-the-shelf} models demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our OOD detector across diverse classification tasks and model architectures, mitigating generalization discrepancies and improving \emph{overall} performance.

Primary Area: unsupervised, self-supervised, semi-supervised, and supervised representation learning

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Submission Number: 12368