# Long-Tailed Out-of-Distribution Detection: Prioritizing Attention to Tail

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.06742 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06742/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [A Baseline for Detecting Misclassified and Out-of-Distribution Examples in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02136/) (2016)
- [What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04977/) (2017)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [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)
- [Class-Balanced Loss Based on Effective Number of Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05555/) (2019)
- [Learning Imbalanced Datasets with Label-Distribution-Aware Margin Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07413/) (2019)
- [Deep Anomaly Detection with Outlier Exposure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04606/) (2018)
- [Decoupling Representation and Classifier for Long-Tailed Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09217/) (2019)
- [Deep Neural Networks are Easily Fooled: High Confidence Predictions for Unrecognizable Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.1897/) (2014)
- [Large-Scale Long-Tailed Recognition in an Open World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05160/) (2019)
- [Long-tail learning via logit adjustment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07314/) (2020)
- [A systematic study of the class imbalance problem in convolutional neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.05381/) (2017)
- [Generalized ODIN: Detecting Out-of-distribution Image without Learning from Out-of-distribution Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11297/) (2020)
- [Understanding the Behaviour of Contrastive Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09740/) (2020)
- [Beyond temperature scaling: Obtaining well-calibrated multiclass probabilities with Dirichlet calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12656/) (2019)
- [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)
- [VOS: Learning What You Don't Know by Virtual Outlier Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01197/) (2022)
- [Equalization Loss for Long-Tailed Object Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05176/) (2020)
- [What is the Effect of Importance Weighting in Deep Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03372/) (2018)
- [Disentangling Label Distribution for Long-tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00321/) (2020)
- [Balanced Contrastive Learning for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09052/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Divide, Weight, and Route: Difficulty-Aware Optimization with Dynamic Expert Fusion for Long-tailed Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19630/) (2025)
- [Keep It on a Leash: Controllable Pseudo-label Generation Towards Realistic Long-Tailed Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03993/) (2025)
- [VMF-GOS: Geometry-guided virtual Outlier Synthesis for Long-Tailed OOD Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05415/) (2026)
- [MARVEL: Margin-Aware Robust von Mises-Fischer Expert Learning for Long-Tailed Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02435/) (2026)
- [How Accurate Is Accurate Enough?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38785/) (2026)
- [Same Loss, Different Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38786/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Current out-of-distribution (OOD) detection methods typically assume balanced in-distribution (ID) data, while most real-world data follow a long-tailed distribution. Previous approaches to long-tailed OOD detection often involve balancing the ID data by reducing the semantics of head classes. However, this reduction can severely affect the classification accuracy of ID data. The main challenge of this task lies in the severe lack of features for tail classes, leading to confusion with OOD data. To tackle this issue, we introduce a novel Prioritizing Attention to Tail (PATT) method using augmentation instead of reduction. Our main intuition involves using a mixture of von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distributions to model the ID data and a temperature scaling module to boost the confidence of ID data. This enables us to generate infinite contrastive pairs, implicitly enhancing the semantics of ID classes while promoting differentiation between ID and OOD data. To further strengthen the detection of OOD data without compromising the classification performance of ID data, we propose feature calibration during the inference phase. By extracting an attention weight from the training set that prioritizes the tail classes and reduces the confidence in OOD data, we improve the OOD detection capability. Extensive experiments verified that our method outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods on various benchmarks.