NERO: Explainable Out-of-Distribution Detection with Neuron-level Relevance

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Chhetri, Anju, Korhonen, Jari, Gyawali, Prashnna, Bhattarai, Binod
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866916966410747904
author Chhetri, Anju
Korhonen, Jari
Gyawali, Prashnna
Bhattarai, Binod
author_facet Chhetri, Anju
Korhonen, Jari
Gyawali, Prashnna
Bhattarai, Binod
contents Ensuring reliability is paramount in deep learning, particularly within the domain of medical imaging, where diagnostic decisions often hinge on model outputs. The capacity to separate out-of-distribution (OOD) samples has proven to be a valuable indicator of a model's reliability in research. In medical imaging, this is especially critical, as identifying OOD inputs can help flag potential anomalies that might otherwise go undetected. While many OOD detection methods rely on feature or logit space representations, recent works suggest these approaches may not fully capture OOD diversity. To address this, we propose a novel OOD scoring mechanism, called NERO, that leverages neuron-level relevance at the feature layer. Specifically, we cluster neuron-level relevance for each in-distribution (ID) class to form representative centroids and introduce a relevance distance metric to quantify a new sample's deviation from these centroids, enhancing OOD separability. Additionally, we refine performance by incorporating scaled relevance in the bias term and combining feature norms. Our framework also enables explainable OOD detection. We validate its effectiveness across multiple deep learning architectures on the gastrointestinal imaging benchmarks Kvasir and GastroVision, achieving improvements over state-of-the-art OOD detection methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_15404
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle NERO: Explainable Out-of-Distribution Detection with Neuron-level Relevance
Chhetri, Anju
Korhonen, Jari
Gyawali, Prashnna
Bhattarai, Binod
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Ensuring reliability is paramount in deep learning, particularly within the domain of medical imaging, where diagnostic decisions often hinge on model outputs. The capacity to separate out-of-distribution (OOD) samples has proven to be a valuable indicator of a model's reliability in research. In medical imaging, this is especially critical, as identifying OOD inputs can help flag potential anomalies that might otherwise go undetected. While many OOD detection methods rely on feature or logit space representations, recent works suggest these approaches may not fully capture OOD diversity. To address this, we propose a novel OOD scoring mechanism, called NERO, that leverages neuron-level relevance at the feature layer. Specifically, we cluster neuron-level relevance for each in-distribution (ID) class to form representative centroids and introduce a relevance distance metric to quantify a new sample's deviation from these centroids, enhancing OOD separability. Additionally, we refine performance by incorporating scaled relevance in the bias term and combining feature norms. Our framework also enables explainable OOD detection. We validate its effectiveness across multiple deep learning architectures on the gastrointestinal imaging benchmarks Kvasir and GastroVision, achieving improvements over state-of-the-art OOD detection methods.
title NERO: Explainable Out-of-Distribution Detection with Neuron-level Relevance
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15404