Multiscale Score Matching for Out-of-Distribution Detection

Ahsan Mahmood, Junier Oliva, Martin Andreas Styner

Keywords: out-of-distribution detection, score matching, deep learning, outlier detection

Abstract: We present a new methodology for detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) images by utilizing norms of the score estimates at multiple noise scales. A score is defined to be the gradient of the log density with respect to the input data. Our methodology is completely unsupervised and follows a straight forward training scheme. First, we train a deep network to estimate scores for $L$ levels of noise. Once trained, we calculate the noisy score estimates for $N$ in-distribution samples and take the L2-norms across the input dimensions (resulting in an $N$x$L$ matrix). Then we train an auxiliary model (such as a Gaussian Mixture Model) to learn the in-distribution spatial regions in this $L$-dimensional space. This auxiliary model can now be used to identify points that reside outside the learned space. Despite its simplicity, our experiments show that this methodology significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art in detecting out-of-distribution images. For example, our method can effectively separate CIFAR-10 (inlier) and SVHN (OOD) images, a setting which has been previously shown to be difficult for deep likelihood models.

One-sentence Summary: Using score estimates at multiple noise scales outperforms state-of-the-art in out-of-distribution detection.

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Code: [ ahsanMah/msma](https://github.com/ahsanMah/msma)

Data: [CIFAR-10](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/cifar-10), [ImageNet](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/imagenet), [LSUN](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/lsun), [SVHN](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/svhn), [iSUN](https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/isun)

Community Implementations: [ 2 code implementations](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2010.13132/code)