Out-of-Distribution Detection using Counterfactual Distance

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Stoica, Maria, Leofante, Francesco, Lomuscio, Alessio
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Stoica, Maria
Leofante, Francesco
Lomuscio, Alessio
author_facet Stoica, Maria
Leofante, Francesco
Lomuscio, Alessio
contents Accurate and explainable out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is required to use machine learning systems safely. Previous work has shown that feature distance to decision boundaries can be used to identify OOD data effectively. In this paper, we build on this intuition and propose a post-hoc OOD detection method that, given an input, calculates the distance to decision boundaries by leveraging counterfactual explanations. Since computing explanations can be expensive for large architectures, we also propose strategies to improve scalability by computing counterfactuals directly in embedding space. Crucially, as the method employs counterfactual explanations, we can seamlessly use them to help interpret the results of our detector. We show that our method is in line with the state of the art on CIFAR-10, achieving 93.50% AUROC and 25.80% FPR95. Our method outperforms these methods on CIFAR-100 with 97.05% AUROC and 13.79% FPR95 and on ImageNet-200 with 92.55% AUROC and 33.55% FPR95 across four OOD datasets
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_10148
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Out-of-Distribution Detection using Counterfactual Distance
Stoica, Maria
Leofante, Francesco
Lomuscio, Alessio
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Accurate and explainable out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is required to use machine learning systems safely. Previous work has shown that feature distance to decision boundaries can be used to identify OOD data effectively. In this paper, we build on this intuition and propose a post-hoc OOD detection method that, given an input, calculates the distance to decision boundaries by leveraging counterfactual explanations. Since computing explanations can be expensive for large architectures, we also propose strategies to improve scalability by computing counterfactuals directly in embedding space. Crucially, as the method employs counterfactual explanations, we can seamlessly use them to help interpret the results of our detector. We show that our method is in line with the state of the art on CIFAR-10, achieving 93.50% AUROC and 25.80% FPR95. Our method outperforms these methods on CIFAR-100 with 97.05% AUROC and 13.79% FPR95 and on ImageNet-200 with 92.55% AUROC and 33.55% FPR95 across four OOD datasets
title Out-of-Distribution Detection using Counterfactual Distance
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10148