Know Your Space: Inlier and Outlier Construction for Calibrating Medical OOD Detectors

Vivek Narayanaswamy, Yamen Mubarka, Rushil Anirudh, Deepta Rajan, Andreas Spanias, Jayaraman J. Thiagarajan

Keywords: Deep neural networks, out-of-distribution detection, data augmentation, energy, medical imaging, open-set recognition

TL;DR: Method for training calibrated OOD detectors for flagging medical imaging anomalies via latent space inlier and pixel space outlier augmentations.

Abstract: We focus on the problem of producing well-calibrated out-of-distribution (OOD) detectors, in order to enable safe deployment of medical image classifiers. Motivated by the difficulty of curating suitable calibration datasets, synthetic augmentations have become highly prevalent for inlier/outlier specification. While there have been rapid advances in data augmentation techniques, this paper makes a striking finding that the space in which the inliers and outliers are synthesized, in addition to the type of augmentation, plays a critical role in calibrating OOD detectors. Using the popular energy-based OOD detection framework, we find that the optimal protocol is to synthesize latent-space inliers along with diverse pixel-space outliers. Based on empirical studies with multiple medical imaging benchmarks, we demonstrate that our approach consistently leads to superior OOD detection ($15\% - 35\%$ in AUROC) over the state-of-the-art in a variety of open-set recognition settings.