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Unsupervised Out-of-Distribution Detection with Batch Normalization (arxiv.org)
2 points by sel1 on Oct 23, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Generative models often score unfamiliar images higher than trained ones, so a simple cutoff fails. This approach compares images within a batch using batch normalization, a trick that rescales each one using its batchmates, and it spots odd images more reliably on high-dimensional pictures.

Abstract

Likelihood from a generative model is a natural statistic for detecting out-of-distribution (OoD) samples. However, generative models have been shown to assign higher likelihood to OoD samples compared to ones from the training distribution, preventing simple threshold-based detection rules. We demonstrate that OoD detection fails even when using more sophisticated statistics based on the likelihoods of individual samples. To address these issues, we propose a new method that leverages batch normalization. We argue that batch normalization for generative models challenges the traditional i.i.d. data assumption and changes the corresponding maximum likelihood objective. Based on this insight, we propose to exploit in-batch dependencies for OoD detection. Empirical results suggest that this leads to more robust detection for high-dimensional images.

Jiaming Song, Yang Song, Stefano Ermon
arXiv:1910.09115 · cs.LG, stat.ML · submitted Oct 21, 2019
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