Leveraging Intermediate Representations for Better Out-of-Distribution Detection

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Gianluca Guglielmo, Marc Masana

Published: 14 Feb 2025, Last Modified: 23 Feb 2026Proceedings of the 28th Computer Vision Winter Workshop, CVWW 2025EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: In real-world applications, machine learning models must reliably detect Out-of-Distribution (OoD) samples to prevent unsafe decisions. Current OoD detection methods often rely on analyzing the logits or the embeddings of the penultimate layer of a neural network. However, little work has been conducted on the exploitation of the rich information encoded in intermediate layers. To address this, we analyze the discriminative power of intermediate layers and show that they can positively be used for OoD detection. Therefore, we propose to regularize intermediate layers with an energy-based contrastive loss, and by grouping multiple layers in a single aggregated response. We demonstrate that intermediate layer activations improves OoD detection performance by running a comprehensive evaluation across multiple datasets.