Ensemble-Based Out-of-Distribution Detection

• Published in: Electronics
• Main Authors: Donghun Yang, Kien Mai Ngoc, Iksoo Shin, Kyong-Ha Lee, Myunggwon Hwang
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021
• Subjects: out-of-distribution detection; confidence score; distance metric learning; Siamese network; triplet network; ensemble method; Electronics; TK7800-8360; DML
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10050567; https://doaj.org/article/2e94fb1c7e0d417fb89516e665c3b6fb

To design an efficient deep learning model that can be used in the real-world, it is important to detect out-of-distribution (OOD) data well. Various studies have been conducted to solve the OOD problem. The current state-of-the-art approach uses a confidence score based on the Mahalanobis distance in a feature space. Although it outperformed the previous approaches, the results were sensitive to the quality of the trained model and the dataset complexity. Herein, we propose a novel OOD detection method that can train more efficient feature space for OOD detection. The proposed method uses an ensemble of the features trained using the softmax-based classifier and the network based on distance metric learning (DML). Through the complementary interaction of these two networks, the trained feature space has a more clumped distribution and can fit well on the Gaussian distribution by class. Therefore, OOD data can be efficiently detected by setting a threshold in the trained feature space. To evaluate the proposed method, we applied our method to various combinations of image datasets. The results show that the overall performance of the proposed approach is superior to those of other methods, including the state-of-the-art approach, on any combination of datasets.