# Self-Supervised Anomaly Detection by Self-Distillation and Negative Sampling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.06378 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.06378/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jan 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [A Baseline for Detecting Misclassified and Out-of-Distribution Examples in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02136/) (2016)
- [Variational Inference with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05770/) (2015)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [LSUN: Construction of a Large-scale Image Dataset using Deep Learning with Humans in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03365/) (2015)
- [Enhancing The Reliability of Out-of-distribution Image Detection in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02690/) (2017)
- [Deep Anomaly Detection with Outlier Exposure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04606/) (2018)
- [Pixel Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.06759/) (2016)
- [Deep Neural Networks are Easily Fooled: High Confidence Predictions for Unrecognizable Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.1897/) (2014)
- [Using Self-Supervised Learning Can Improve Model Robustness and Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.12340/) (2019)
- [Likelihood Ratios for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02845/) (2019)
- [Do Deep Generative Models Know What They Don't Know?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.09136/) (2018)
- [CSI: Novelty Detection via Contrastive Learning on Distributionally Shifted Instances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08176/) (2020)
- [Training Confidence-calibrated Classifiers for Detecting Out-of-Distribution Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09325/) (2017)
- [Debiased Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00224/) (2020)
- [Why ReLU networks yield high-confidence predictions far away from the training data and how to mitigate the problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05720/) (2018)
- [Pretrained Transformers Improve Out-of-Distribution Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06100/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03004/) (2021)
- [Deep Anomaly Detection Using Geometric Transformations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10917/) (2018)
- [SSD: A Unified Framework for Self-Supervised Outlier Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12051/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Rethinking cluster-conditioned diffusion models for label-free image synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00570/) (2024)
- [Adapting Contrastive Language-Image Pretrained (CLIP) Models for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05828/) (2023)
- [The Invisible Gorilla Effect in Out-of-distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20068/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Detecting whether examples belong to a given in-distribution or are Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) requires identifying features specific to the in-distribution. In the absence of labels, these features can be learned by self-supervised techniques under the generic assumption that the most abstract features are those which are statistically most over-represented in comparison to other distributions from the same domain. In this work, we show that self-distillation of the in-distribution training set together with contrasting against negative examples derived from shifting transformation of auxiliary data strongly improves OOD detection. We find that this improvement depends on how the negative samples are generated. In particular, we observe that by leveraging negative samples, which keep the statistics of low-level features while changing the high-level semantics, higher average detection performance is obtained. Furthermore, good negative sampling strategies can be identified from the sensitivity of the OOD detection score. The efficiency of our approach is demonstrated across a diverse range of OOD detection problems, setting new benchmarks for unsupervised OOD detection in the visual domain.