BootOOD: Self-Supervised Out-of-Distribution Detection via Synthetic Sample Exposure under Neural Collapse

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wang, Yuanchao, Qin, Tian, Valle, Eduardo, Abrahao, Bruno
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Wang, Yuanchao
Qin, Tian
Valle, Eduardo
Abrahao, Bruno
author_facet Wang, Yuanchao
Qin, Tian
Valle, Eduardo
Abrahao, Bruno
contents Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is critical for deploying image classifiers in safety-sensitive environments, yet existing detectors often struggle when OOD samples are semantically similar to the in-distribution (ID) classes. We present BootOOD, a fully self-supervised OOD detection framework that bootstraps exclusively from ID data and is explicitly designed to handle semantically challenging OOD samples. BootOOD synthesizes pseudo-OOD features through simple transformations of ID representations and leverages Neural Collapse (NC), where ID features cluster tightly around class means with consistent feature norms. Unlike prior approaches that aim to constrain OOD features into subspaces orthogonal to the collapsed ID means, BootOOD introduces a lightweight auxiliary head that performs radius-based classification on feature norms. This design decouples OOD detection from the primary classifier and imposes a relaxed requirement: OOD samples are learned to have smaller feature norms than ID features, which is easier to satisfy when ID and OOD are semantically close. Experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet-200 show that BootOOD outperforms prior post-hoc methods, surpasses training-based methods without outlier exposure, and is competitive with state-of-the-art outlier-exposure approaches while maintaining or improving ID accuracy.
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publishDate 2025
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spellingShingle BootOOD: Self-Supervised Out-of-Distribution Detection via Synthetic Sample Exposure under Neural Collapse
Wang, Yuanchao
Qin, Tian
Valle, Eduardo
Abrahao, Bruno
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is critical for deploying image classifiers in safety-sensitive environments, yet existing detectors often struggle when OOD samples are semantically similar to the in-distribution (ID) classes. We present BootOOD, a fully self-supervised OOD detection framework that bootstraps exclusively from ID data and is explicitly designed to handle semantically challenging OOD samples. BootOOD synthesizes pseudo-OOD features through simple transformations of ID representations and leverages Neural Collapse (NC), where ID features cluster tightly around class means with consistent feature norms. Unlike prior approaches that aim to constrain OOD features into subspaces orthogonal to the collapsed ID means, BootOOD introduces a lightweight auxiliary head that performs radius-based classification on feature norms. This design decouples OOD detection from the primary classifier and imposes a relaxed requirement: OOD samples are learned to have smaller feature norms than ID features, which is easier to satisfy when ID and OOD are semantically close. Experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet-200 show that BootOOD outperforms prior post-hoc methods, surpasses training-based methods without outlier exposure, and is competitive with state-of-the-art outlier-exposure approaches while maintaining or improving ID accuracy.
title BootOOD: Self-Supervised Out-of-Distribution Detection via Synthetic Sample Exposure under Neural Collapse
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.13539