# Margin-bounded Confidence Scores for Out-of-Distribution Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.07185 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07185/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Sep 2024.

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

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (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)
- [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)
- [Deep Anomaly Detection with Outlier Exposure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04606/) (2018)
- [Generalized Out-of-Distribution Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11334/) (2021)
- [Weight Normalization: A Simple Reparameterization to Accelerate Training of Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07868/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Training Confidence-calibrated Classifiers for Detecting Out-of-Distribution Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09325/) (2017)
- [A Downsampled Variant of ImageNet as an Alternative to the CIFAR datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.08819/) (2017)
- [OpenOOD: Benchmarking Generalized Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07242/) (2022)
- [Large image datasets: A pyrrhic win for computer vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16923/) (2020)
- [DICE: Leveraging Sparsification for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09805/) (2021)
- [TurkerGaze: Crowdsourcing Saliency with Webcam based Eye Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06755/) (2015)
- [ATOM: Robustifying Out-of-distribution Detection Using Outlier Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15207/) (2020)
- [Provable Guarantees for Understanding Out-of-distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00787/) (2021)
- [Standardized Max Logits: A Simple yet Effective Approach for Identifying Unexpected Road Obstacles in Urban-Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11264/) (2021)
- [Places: An Image Database for Deep Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02055/) (2016)
- [Mixture Outlier Exposure: Towards Out-of-Distribution Detection in Fine-grained Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03917/) (2021)
- [Out-of-distribution Detection with Implicit Outlier Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05033/) (2023)
- [OpenMix: Exploring Outlier Samples for Misclassification Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17093/) (2023)
- [Diversified Outlier Exposure for Out-of-Distribution Detection via Informative Extrapolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13923/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Handling Out-of-Distribution Data: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21160/) (2025)
- [General OOD Detection via Model-aware and Subspace-aware Variable Priority](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.13003/) (2025)
- [Segmentation-Based Attention Entropy: Detecting and Mitigating Object Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16558/) (2026)
- [RAG-CT: Mitigating Privacy Risks on Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems via Scanning Prompt Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.16095/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In many critical Machine Learning applications, such as autonomous driving and medical image diagnosis, the detection of out-of-distribution (OOD) samples is as crucial as accurately classifying in-distribution (ID) inputs. Recently Outlier Exposure (OE) based methods have shown promising results in detecting OOD inputs via model fine-tuning with auxiliary outlier data. However, most of the previous OE-based approaches emphasize more on synthesizing extra outlier samples or introducing regularization to diversify OOD sample space, which is rather unquantifiable in practice. In this work, we propose a novel and straightforward method called Margin bounded Confidence Scores (MaCS) to address the nontrivial OOD detection problem by enlarging the disparity between ID and OOD scores, which in turn makes the decision boundary more compact facilitating effective segregation with a simple threshold. Specifically, we augment the learning objective of an OE regularized classifier with a supplementary constraint, which penalizes high confidence scores for OOD inputs compared to that of ID and significantly enhances the OOD detection performance while maintaining the ID classification accuracy. Extensive experiments on various benchmark datasets for image classification tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method by significantly outperforming state-of-the-art (S.O.T.A) methods on various benchmarking metrics. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/lakpa-tamang9/margin_ood