# Out-of-Distribution Detection with Semantic Mismatch under Masking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.00446 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00446/

## Key facts

- Cited by 22 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [Concrete Problems in AI Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06565/) (2016)
- [A Simple Unified Framework for Detecting Out-of-Distribution Samples and Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03888/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Energy-based Out-of-distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03759/) (2020)
- [Deep Anomaly Detection with Outlier Exposure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04606/) (2018)
- [Image Quality Assessment: Unifying Structure and Texture Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07728/) (2020)
- [Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08318/) (2018)
- [Generalized Out-of-Distribution Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11334/) (2021)
- [Deep Neural Networks are Easily Fooled: High Confidence Predictions for Unrecognizable Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.1897/) (2014)
- [Unsupervised Anomaly Detection with Generative Adversarial Networks to Guide Marker Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05921/) (2017)
- [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)
- [On the Importance of Gradients for Detecting Distributional Shifts in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00218/) (2021)
- [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)
- [cGANs with Projection Discriminator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05637/) (2018)
- [Why Normalizing Flows Fail to Detect Out-of-Distribution Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08545/) (2020)
- [Modulating early visual processing by language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.00683/) (2017)
- [Generative OpenMax for Multi-Class Open Set Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07418/) (2017)
- [C2AE: Class Conditioned Auto-Encoder for Open-set Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01198/) (2019)
- [A U-Net Based Discriminator for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12655/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Towards Open Vocabulary Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15880/) (2023)
- [DiffGuard: Semantic Mismatch-Guided Out-of-Distribution Detection using Pre-trained Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07687/) (2023)
- [Out-of-Distribution Detection: A Task-Oriented Survey of Recent Advances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11884/) (2024)
- [Your Data Is Not Perfect: Towards Cross-Domain Out-of-Distribution Detection in Class-Imbalanced Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06284/) (2024)
- [Conjugated Semantic Pool Improves OOD Detection with Pre-trained Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08611/) (2024)
- [Open World Object Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11301/) (2024)
- [Uncertainty-Guided Appearance-Motion Association Network for Out-of-Distribution Action Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09953/) (2024)
- [Adaptive Hierarchical Graph Cut for Multi-granularity Out-of-distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15668/) (2024)
- [Adaptive Multi-prompt Contrastive Network for Few-shot Out-of-distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17633/) (2025)
- [Out-of-Distribution Detection for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06072/) (2023)
- [Not All Inputs Are Valid: Towards Open-Set Video Moment Retrieval Using Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29812/) (2026)
- [Classifier-head Informed Feature Masking and Prototype-based Logit Smoothing for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18104/) (2023)
- [Expecting The Unexpected: Towards Broad Out-Of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11480/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervised Likelihood Estimation with Energy Guidance for Anomaly Segmentation in Urban Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06815/) (2023)
- [A Hybrid Architecture for Out of Domain Intent Detection and Intent Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04134/) (2023)
- [Non-Cross Diffusion for Semantic Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00820/) (2023)
- [Immuno-VLM: Immunizing Large Vision-Language Models via Generative Semantic Antibodies for Open-World Trustworthiness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30745/) (2026)
- [Collaborative Knowledge Distillation via a Learning-by-Education Node Community](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00074/) (2024)
- [Hypercone Assisted Contour Generation for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.10209/) (2025)
- [Multi-label out-of-distribution detection via evidential learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18224/) (2025)
- [An Empirical Analysis of VLM-based OOD Detection: Mechanisms, Advantages, and Sensitivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13375/) (2025)
- [Learning Hyperspherical Time-Frequency Representations for Time-Series Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.31155/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper proposes a novel out-of-distribution (OOD) detection framework named MoodCat for image classifiers. MoodCat masks a random portion of the input image and uses a generative model to synthesize the masked image to a new image conditioned on the classification result. It then calculates the semantic difference between the original image and the synthesized one for OOD detection. Compared to existing solutions, MoodCat naturally learns the semantic information of the in-distribution data with the proposed mask and conditional synthesis strategy, which is critical to identifying OODs. Experimental results demonstrate that MoodCat outperforms state-of-the-art OOD detection solutions by a large margin.