# Is it all a cluster game? -- Exploring Out-of-Distribution Detection based on Clustering in the Embedding Space

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.08549 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08549/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [A Simple Unified Framework for Detecting Out-of-Distribution Samples and Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03888/) (2018)
- [Enhancing The Reliability of Out-of-distribution Image Detection in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02690/) (2017)
- [Learning deep representations by mutual information estimation and maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06670/) (2018)
- [Deep Anomaly Detection with Outlier Exposure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04606/) (2018)
- [Deep Neural Networks are Easily Fooled: High Confidence Predictions for Unrecognizable Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.1897/) (2014)
- [Learning Representations by Maximizing Mutual Information Across Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00910/) (2019)
- [Data-Efficient Image Recognition with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09272/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Generalized ODIN: Detecting Out-of-distribution Image without Learning from Out-of-distribution Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11297/) (2020)
- [Recent Advances in Open Set Recognition: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08581/) (2018)
- [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)
- [A review of deep learning in medical imaging: Imaging traits, technology trends, case studies with progress highlights, and future promises](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09104/) (2020)
- [OCGAN: One-class Novelty Detection Using GANs with Constrained Latent Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08550/) (2019)
- [Contrastive Training for Improved Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.05566/) (2020)
- [Posterior Network: Uncertainty Estimation without OOD Samples via Density-Based Pseudo-Counts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09239/) (2020)
- [Generative Probabilistic Novelty Detection with Adversarial Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02588/) (2018)
- [Scene Graph Reasoning for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01072/) (2020)
- [Confidence-based Out-of-Distribution Detection: A Comparative Study and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02568/) (2021)
- [OODformer: Out-Of-Distribution Detection Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08976/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Towards OOD Detection in Graph Classification from Uncertainty Estimation Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10691/) (2022)
- [Distribution Shifts at Scale: Out-of-distribution Detection in Earth Observation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13394/) (2024)
- [NCDD: Nearest Centroid Distance Deficit for Out-Of-Distribution Detection in Gastrointestinal Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01590/) (2024)
- [Cluster-aware Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Out-of-distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02598/) (2023)
- [Face-Trace: Open-Set Attribution and Progressive Discovery of Synthetic Face Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.07545/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

It is essential for safety-critical applications of deep neural networks to determine when new inputs are significantly different from the training distribution. In this paper, we explore this out-of-distribution (OOD) detection problem for image classification using clusters of semantically similar embeddings of the training data and exploit the differences in distance relationships to these clusters between in- and out-of-distribution data. We study the structure and separation of clusters in the embedding space and find that supervised contrastive learning leads to well-separated clusters while its self-supervised counterpart fails to do so. In our extensive analysis of different training methods, clustering strategies, distance metrics, and thresholding approaches, we observe that there is no clear winner. The optimal approach depends on the model architecture and selected datasets for in- and out-of-distribution. While we could reproduce the outstanding results for contrastive training on CIFAR-10 as in-distribution data, we find standard cross-entropy paired with cosine similarity outperforms all contrastive training methods when training on CIFAR-100 instead. Cross-entropy provides competitive results as compared to expensive contrastive training methods.