GAIA: Delving into Gradient-based Attribution Abnormality for Out-of-distribution Detection
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Abstract (arXiv)
Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) examples is crucial to guarantee the reliability and safety of deep neural networks in real-world settings. In this paper, we offer an innovative perspective on quantifying the disparities between in-distribution (ID) and OOD data -- analyzing the uncertainty that arises when models attempt to explain their predictive decisions. This perspective is motivated by our observation that gradient-based attribution methods encounter challenges in assigning feature importance to OOD data, thereby yielding divergent explanation patterns. Consequently, we investigate how attribution gradients lead to uncertain explanation outcomes and introduce two forms of abnormalities for OOD detection: the zero-deflation abnormality and the channel-wise average abnormality. We then propose GAIA, a simple and effective approach that incorporates Gradient Abnormality Inspection and Aggregation. The effectiveness of GAIA is validated on both commonly utilized (CIFAR) and large-scale (ImageNet-1k) benchmarks. Specifically, GAIA reduces the average FPR95 by 23.10% on CIFAR10 and by 45.41% on CIFAR100 compared to advanced post-hoc methods.
Key facts. Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 33 of its 42 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 16 Nov 2023.
Builds on
33 of 42 references.
References · 33
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21 more
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2023: 1; 2024: 3; 2025: 5; 2026: 3.
12 papers.
- 2024Out-of-Distribution Detection: A Task-Oriented Survey of Recent Advancescited by 24
- 2025CADRef: Robust Out-of-Distribution Detection via Class-Aware Decoupled Relative Feature Leveragingcited by 8
- 2025AdaSCALE: Adaptive Scaling for OOD Detectioncited by 7
- 2024Your Classifier Can Be Secretly a Likelihood-Based OOD Detectorcited by 4
- 2024PRENet: A Plane-Fit Redundancy Encoding Point Cloud Sequence Network for Real-Time 3D Action Recognitioncited by 2
- 2025GradPCA: Leveraging NTK Alignment for Reliable Out-of-Distribution Detectioncited by 2
- 2025Activation Subspaces for Out-of-Distribution Detectioncited by 2
- 2026UniAlign: A Model-Agnostic Framework for Robust Network Traffic Classification under Distribution Shiftscited by 1
- 2023GROOD: GRadient-Aware Out-of-Distribution Detectioncited by 0
- 2025Open Set Domain Adaptation with Vision-language models via Gradient-aware Separationcited by 0
- 2026The Invisible Gorilla Effect in Out-of-distribution Detectioncited by 0
- 2026Learning Hyperspherical Time-Frequency Representations for Time-Series Out-of-Distribution Detectioncited by 0
- 2026Learning Hyperspherical Time-Frequency Representations for Time-Series Out-of-Distribution Detection29 May 2026
- 2026UniAlign: A Model-Agnostic Framework for Robust Network Traffic Classification under Distribution Shifts17 May 2026
- 2026The Invisible Gorilla Effect in Out-of-distribution Detection23 Feb 2026
- 2025Activation Subspaces for Out-of-Distribution Detection29 Aug 2025
- 2025GradPCA: Leveraging NTK Alignment for Reliable Out-of-Distribution Detection21 May 2025
- 2025Open Set Domain Adaptation with Vision-language models via Gradient-aware Separation16 May 2025
- 2025AdaSCALE: Adaptive Scaling for OOD Detection11 Mar 2025
- 2025CADRef: Robust Out-of-Distribution Detection via Class-Aware Decoupled Relative Feature Leveraging1 Mar 2025
- 2024Out-of-Distribution Detection: A Task-Oriented Survey of Recent Advances18 Sep 2024
- 2024Your Classifier Can Be Secretly a Likelihood-Based OOD Detector9 Aug 2024
- 2024PRENet: A Plane-Fit Redundancy Encoding Point Cloud Sequence Network for Real-Time 3D Action Recognition11 May 2024
- 2023GROOD: GRadient-Aware Out-of-Distribution Detection22 Dec 2023