Out-of-Distribution Detection using Vision Transformers

Xuan Li, Christian Desrosiers, Xue Liu

Keywords: Out-of-Distribution detection, OOD detection, Vision transformer, anomaly detection, uncertain estimation

Abstract: Vision-based transformers have achieved comparable results to CNN models in tasks including object detection, image classification, and semantic segmentation. However, their performance in detecting Out-of-Distribution (OOD) samples during inference has not been fully evaluated. OOD detection plays an important role in safety-critical applications such as medical image analysis. In this paper, we evaluate 4 transformers on 2 open-sourced medical image datasets. Our results demonstrate the insufficient OOD detection performance of the transformers. Hence, future research in improving OOD detection should be encouraged.

Paper Type: validation/application paper

Primary Subject Area: Detection and Diagnosis

Secondary Subject Area: Uncertainty Estimation

Paper Status: original work, not submitted yet

Source Code Url: https://github.com/Shaunlipy/vision-ood

Data Set Url: https://github.com/Shaunlipy/vision-ood

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TL;DR: We evaluate the OOD detection performance using vision-based transformers, and results reveal insufficient performance with promising research directions.