A Mixture of Exemplars Approach for Efficient Out-of-Distribution Detection with Foundation Models

One of the early weaknesses identified in deep neural networks trained for image classification tasks was their inability to provide low confidence predictions on out-of-distribution (OOD) data that was significantly different from the in-distribution (ID) data used to train them. Representation learning, where neural networks are trained in specific ways that improve their ability to detect OOD examples, has emerged as a promising solution. However, these approaches require long training times and can add additional overhead to detect OOD examples. Recent developments in Vision Transformer (ViT) foundation modelsunicodex2013large networks trained on large and diverse datasets with self-supervised approachesunicodex2013also show strong performance in OOD detection, and could address these challenges. This paper presents Mixture of Exemplars (MoLAR), an efficient approach to tackling OOD detection challenges that is designed to maximise the benefit of training a classifier with a high quality, frozen, pretrained foundation model backbone. MoLAR provides strong OOD detection performance when only comparing the similarity of OOD examples to the exemplars, a small set of images chosen to be representative of the dataset, leading to significantly reduced overhead for OOD detection inference over other methods that provide best performance when the full ID dataset is used. Extensive experiments demonstrate the improved OOD detection performance of MoLAR in comparison to comparable approaches in both supervised and semi-supervised settings, and code is available at github.com/emannix/molar-mixture-of-exemplars.