# GROOD: GRadient-Aware Out-of-Distribution Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.14427 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14427/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [A Baseline for Detecting Misclassified and Out-of-Distribution Examples in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02136/) (2016)
- [Invariant Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02893/) (2019)
- [A Simple Unified Framework for Detecting Out-of-Distribution Samples and Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03888/) (2018)
- [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)
- [A Survey on Deep Learning in Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05747/) (2017)
- [End to End Learning for Self-Driving Cars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07316/) (2016)
- [Deep Neural Networks are Easily Fooled: High Confidence Predictions for Unrecognizable Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.1897/) (2014)
- [Prevalence of Neural Collapse during the terminal phase of deep learning training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08186/) (2020)
- [Out-of-Distribution Detection with Deep Nearest Neighbors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06507/) (2022)
- [Towards Open Set Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06233/) (2015)
- [ReAct: Out-of-distribution Detection With Rectified Activations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12797/) (2021)
- [Scaling Out-of-Distribution Detection for Real-World Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11132/) (2019)
- [Generalized ODIN: Detecting Out-of-distribution Image without Learning from Out-of-distribution Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11297/) (2020)
- [ViM: Out-Of-Distribution with Virtual-logit Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10807/) (2022)
- [On the Importance of Gradients for Detecting Distributional Shifts in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00218/) (2021)
- [Learning Models with Uniform Performance via Distributionally Robust Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.08750/) (2018)
- [OpenOOD: Benchmarking Generalized Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07242/) (2022)
- [Extremely Simple Activation Shaping for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09858/) (2022)
- [A Simple Fix to Mahalanobis Distance for Improving Near-OOD Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09022/) (2021)
- [OpenOOD v1.5: Enhanced Benchmark for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09301/) (2023)
- [DICE: Leveraging Sparsification for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09805/) (2021)
- [OpenGAN: Open-Set Recognition via Open Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02939/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is crucial for ensuring the reliability of deep learning models in real-world applications. Existing methods typically focus on feature representations or output-space analysis, often assuming a distribution over these spaces or leveraging gradient norms with respect to model parameters. However, these approaches struggle to distinguish near-OOD samples and often require extensive hyper-parameter tuning, limiting their practicality.In this work, we propose GRadient-aware Out-Of-Distribution detection (GROOD), a method that derives an OOD prototype from synthetic samples and computes class prototypes directly from In-distribution (ID) training data. By analyzing the gradients of a nearest-class-prototype loss function concerning an artificial OOD prototype, our approach achieves a clear separation between in-distribution and OOD samples. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that gradients computed from the OOD prototype enhance the distinction between ID and OOD data, surpassing established baselines in robustness, particularly on ImageNet-1k. These findings highlight the potential of gradient-based methods and prototype-driven approaches in advancing OOD detection within deep neural networks.
