# SELFOOD: Self-Supervised Out-Of-Distribution Detection via Learning to Rank

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14696 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14696/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 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 24 May 2023.

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

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [A Baseline for Detecting Misclassified and Out-of-Distribution Examples in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02136/) (2016)
- [Character-level Convolutional Networks for Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.01626/) (2015)
- [A Simple Unified Framework for Detecting Out-of-Distribution Samples and Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03888/) (2018)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks for Sentence Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1408.5882/) (2014)
- [Sigmoid-Weighted Linear Units for Neural Network Function Approximation in Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.03118/) (2017)
- [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)
- [An Empirical Study of Example Forgetting during Deep Neural Network Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05159/) (2018)
- [Likelihood Ratios for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02845/) (2019)
- [Generalized ODIN: Detecting Out-of-distribution Image without Learning from Out-of-distribution Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11297/) (2020)
- [An Evaluation Dataset for Intent Classification and Out-of-Scope Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02027/) (2019)
- [Mitigating Neural Network Overconfidence with Logit Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09310/) (2022)
- [Learning Confidence for Out-of-Distribution Detection in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04865/) (2018)
- [Selective Question Answering under Domain Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09462/) (2020)
- [Out-of-Distribution Detection Using an Ensemble of Self Supervised Leave-out Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.03576/) (2018)
- [Confidence-Aware Learning for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01458/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Out-of-Distribution Detection for Pretrained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08812/) (2021)
- [Revisiting Mahalanobis Distance for Transformer-Based Out-of-Domain Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03778/) (2021)
- [Top-label calibration and multiclass-to-binary reductions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08353/) (2021)
- [Modeling Discriminative Representations for Out-of-Domain Detection with Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14289/) (2021)
- [Out-of-Scope Intent Detection with Self-Supervision and Discriminative Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08616/) (2021)
- [Likelihood Ratios and Generative Classifiers for Unsupervised Out-of-Domain Detection In Task Oriented Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12800/) (2019)
- [Coarse2Fine: Fine-grained Text Classification on Coarsely-grained Annotated Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10856/) (2021)
- [Leveraging QA Datasets to Improve Generative Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12604/) (2022)

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

- [FOOGD: Federated Collaboration for Both Out-of-distribution Generalization and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11397/) (2024)
- [DAIL: Data Augmentation for In-Context Learning via Self-Paraphrase](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03319/) (2023)
- [HAAF: Hierarchical Adaptation and Alignment of Foundation Models for Few-Shot Pathology Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17405/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep neural classifiers trained with cross-entropy loss (CE loss) often suffer from poor calibration, necessitating the task of out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. Traditional supervised OOD detection methods require expensive manual annotation of in-distribution and OOD samples. To address the annotation bottleneck, we introduce SELFOOD, a self-supervised OOD detection method that requires only in-distribution samples as supervision. We cast OOD detection as an inter-document intra-label (IDIL) ranking problem and train the classifier with our pairwise ranking loss, referred to as IDIL loss. Specifically, given a set of in-distribution documents and their labels, for each label, we train the classifier to rank the softmax scores of documents belonging to that label to be higher than the scores of documents that belong to other labels. Unlike CE loss, our IDIL loss function reaches zero when the desired confidence ranking is achieved and gradients are backpropagated to decrease probabilities associated with incorrect labels rather than continuously increasing the probability of the correct label. Extensive experiments with several classifiers on multiple classification datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in both coarse- and fine-grained settings.