# Fake It Till You Make It: Towards Accurate Near-Distribution Novelty Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.14297 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14297/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [A Baseline for Detecting Misclassified and Out-of-Distribution Examples in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02136/) (2016)
- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5151/) (2013)
- [Training Generative Adversarial Networks with Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06676/) (2020)
- [CutPaste: Self-Supervised Learning for Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04015/) (2021)
- [Using Self-Supervised Learning Can Improve Model Robustness and Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.12340/) (2019)
- [StyleGAN-XL: Scaling StyleGAN to Large Diverse Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.00273/) (2022)
- [CSI: Novelty Detection via Contrastive Learning on Distributionally Shifted Instances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08176/) (2020)
- [Reliable Fidelity and Diversity Metrics for Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.09797/) (2020)
- [A Unifying Review of Deep and Shallow Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.11732/) (2020)
- [Uninformed Students: Student-Teacher Anomaly Detection with Discriminative Latent Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02357/) (2019)
- [Open-Set Recognition: a Good Closed-Set Classifier is All You Need?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06207/) (2021)
- [Deep Semi-Supervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02694/) (2019)
- [Multiresolution Knowledge Distillation for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11108/) (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)
- [Contrastive Training for Improved Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.05566/) (2020)
- [PANDA: Adapting Pretrained Features for Anomaly Detection and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05903/) (2020)
- [Generative OpenMax for Multi-Class Open Set Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07418/) (2017)
- [A Unified Survey on Anomaly, Novelty, Open-Set, and Out-of-Distribution Detection: Solutions and Future Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14051/) (2021)
- [Learning Placeholders for Open-Set Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15086/) (2021)
- [Deep Nearest Neighbor Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10445/) (2020)
- [Mean-Shifted Contrastive Loss for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03844/) (2021)
- [Densely connected normalizing flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04627/) (2021)
- [G2D: Generate to Detect Anomaly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11629/) (2020)
- [ARAE: Adversarially Robust Training of Autoencoders Improves Novelty Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05669/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Video Anomaly Detection via Spatio-Temporal Pseudo-Anomaly Generation : A Unified Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16514/) (2023)
- [Managing the unknown: a survey on Open Set Recognition and tangential areas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08785/) (2023)
- [Microstructure quality control of steels using deep learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00797/) (2023)
- [Contrastive Knowledge Distillation for Anomaly Detection in Multi-Illumination/Focus Display Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.05520/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We aim for image-based novelty detection. Despite considerable progress, existing models either fail or face a dramatic drop under the so-called "near-distribution" setting, where the differences between normal and anomalous samples are subtle. We first demonstrate existing methods experience up to 20% decrease in performance in the near-distribution setting. Next, we propose to exploit a score-based generative model to produce synthetic near-distribution anomalous data. Our model is then fine-tuned to distinguish such data from the normal samples. We provide a quantitative as well as qualitative evaluation of this strategy, and compare the results with a variety of GAN-based models. Effectiveness of our method for both the near-distribution and standard novelty detection is assessed through extensive experiments on datasets in diverse applications such as medical images, object classification, and quality control. This reveals that our method considerably improves over existing models, and consistently decreases the gap between the near-distribution and standard novelty detection performance. The code repository is available at https://github.com/rohban-lab/FITYMI.