# Leveraging Intermediate Representations for Better Out-of-Distribution Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.12849 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12849/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [Concrete Problems in AI Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06565/) (2016)
- [A Simple Unified Framework for Detecting Out-of-Distribution Samples and Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03888/) (2018)
- [Energy-based Out-of-distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03759/) (2020)
- [Generalized Out-of-Distribution Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11334/) (2021)
- [Deep Neural Networks are Easily Fooled: High Confidence Predictions for Unrecognizable Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.1897/) (2014)
- [Out-of-Distribution Detection with Deep Nearest Neighbors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06507/) (2022)
- [ReAct: Out-of-distribution Detection With Rectified Activations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12797/) (2021)
- [CSI: Novelty Detection via Contrastive Learning on Distributionally Shifted Instances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08176/) (2020)
- [Towards Out-Of-Distribution Generalization: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13624/) (2021)
- [Generalized ODIN: Detecting Out-of-distribution Image without Learning from Out-of-distribution Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11297/) (2020)
- [Your Classifier is Secretly an Energy Based Model and You Should Treat it Like One](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03263/) (2019)
- [ViM: Out-Of-Distribution with Virtual-logit Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10807/) (2022)
- [Mitigating Neural Network Overconfidence with Logit Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09310/) (2022)
- [Learning Confidence for Out-of-Distribution Detection in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04865/) (2018)
- [Extremely Simple Activation Shaping for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09858/) (2022)
- [OpenOOD v1.5: Enhanced Benchmark for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09301/) (2023)
- [In or Out? Fixing ImageNet Out-of-Distribution Detection Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00826/) (2023)
- [Head2Toe: Utilizing Intermediate Representations for Better Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03529/) (2022)
- [Connecting the Dots in Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence: From AI Principles, Ethics, and Key Requirements to Responsible AI Systems and Regulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02231/) (2023)
- [Diversified Outlier Exposure for Out-of-Distribution Detection via Informative Extrapolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13923/) (2023)
- [Learning to Augment Distributions for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01796/) (2023)
- [The iNaturalist Species Classification and Detection Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06642/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Mysteries of the Deep: Role of Intermediate Representations in Out of Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05782/) (2025)
- [Prototype Fusion: A Training-Free Multi-Layer Approach to OOD Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23677/) (2026)
- [Ranked Activation Shift for Post-Hoc Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08572/) (2026)
- [Sparse Autoencoders for Interpretable Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12094/) (2026)
- [Not All Layers Are Equal: Dynamic Layer Routing for Reliable CLIP OOD Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.20299/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In real-world applications, machine learning models must reliably detect Out-of-Distribution (OoD) samples to prevent unsafe decisions. Current OoD detection methods often rely on analyzing the logits or the embeddings of the penultimate layer of a neural network. However, little work has been conducted on the exploitation of the rich information encoded in intermediate layers. To address this, we analyze the discriminative power of intermediate layers and show that they can positively be used for OoD detection. Therefore, we propose to regularize intermediate layers with an energy-based contrastive loss, and by grouping multiple layers in a single aggregated response. We demonstrate that intermediate layer activations improves OoD detection performance by running a comprehensive evaluation across multiple datasets.