Revisiting Likelihood-Based Out-of-Distribution Detection by Modeling Representations

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ding, Yifan, Aleksandraus, Arturas, Ahmadian, Amirhossein, Unger, Jonas, Lindsten, Fredrik, Eilertsen, Gabriel
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Ding, Yifan
Aleksandraus, Arturas
Ahmadian, Amirhossein
Unger, Jonas
Lindsten, Fredrik
Eilertsen, Gabriel
author_facet Ding, Yifan
Aleksandraus, Arturas
Ahmadian, Amirhossein
Unger, Jonas
Lindsten, Fredrik
Eilertsen, Gabriel
contents Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is critical for ensuring the reliability of deep learning systems, particularly in safety-critical applications. Likelihood-based deep generative models have historically faced criticism for their unsatisfactory performance in OOD detection, often assigning higher likelihood to OOD data than in-distribution samples when applied to image data. In this work, we demonstrate that likelihood is not inherently flawed. Rather, several properties in the images space prohibit likelihood as a valid detection score. Given a sufficiently good likelihood estimator, specifically using the probability flow formulation of a diffusion model, we show that likelihood-based methods can still perform on par with state-of-the-art methods when applied in the representation space of pre-trained encoders. The code of our work can be found at $\href{https://github.com/limchaos/Likelihood-OOD.git}{\texttt{https://github.com/limchaos/Likelihood-OOD.git}}$.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_07793
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Revisiting Likelihood-Based Out-of-Distribution Detection by Modeling Representations
Ding, Yifan
Aleksandraus, Arturas
Ahmadian, Amirhossein
Unger, Jonas
Lindsten, Fredrik
Eilertsen, Gabriel
Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is critical for ensuring the reliability of deep learning systems, particularly in safety-critical applications. Likelihood-based deep generative models have historically faced criticism for their unsatisfactory performance in OOD detection, often assigning higher likelihood to OOD data than in-distribution samples when applied to image data. In this work, we demonstrate that likelihood is not inherently flawed. Rather, several properties in the images space prohibit likelihood as a valid detection score. Given a sufficiently good likelihood estimator, specifically using the probability flow formulation of a diffusion model, we show that likelihood-based methods can still perform on par with state-of-the-art methods when applied in the representation space of pre-trained encoders. The code of our work can be found at $\href{https://github.com/limchaos/Likelihood-OOD.git}{\texttt{https://github.com/limchaos/Likelihood-OOD.git}}$.
title Revisiting Likelihood-Based Out-of-Distribution Detection by Modeling Representations
topic Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.07793