# Vmem-varphi: Low-Compute Out-of-Distribution Detection in Spiking Neural Networks from Membrane-Potential Statistics

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00350 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00350/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [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)
- [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)
- [Event-based Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08405/) (2019)
- [Towards Total Recall in Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08265/) (2021)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Revisiting Classifier Two-Sample Tests](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.06545/) (2016)
- [Learning to Detect Objects with a 1 Megapixel Event Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13436/) (2020)
- [A Large Scale Event-based Detection Dataset for Automotive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08499/) (2020)
- [N-ImageNet: Towards Robust, Fine-Grained Object Recognition with Event Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01041/) (2021)
- [Integer-Valued Training and Spike-Driven Inference Spiking Neural Network for High-performance and Energy-efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20708/) (2024)
- [Event Camera Calibration of Per-pixel Biased Contrast Threshold](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09378/) (2020)
- [Efficient Event-Based Object Detection: A Hybrid Neural Network with Spatial and Temporal Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10173/) (2024)
- [Feature Density Estimation for Out-of-Distribution Detection via Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06537/) (2024)
- [Forward-Forward Learning achieves Highly Selective Latent Representations for Out-of-Distribution Detection in Fully Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14097/) (2024)
- [Out-of-Distribution Example Detection in Deep Neural Networks using Distance to Modelled Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10673/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer an energy-efficient approach to processing event-camera data, yet out-of-distribution (OOD) detection remains challenging in this setting. Existing OOD detection methods often depend on model outputs or computational components that are unavailable in object detection SNNs or are poorly suited to low-compute deployment. To that effect, we show that the subthreshold membrane potential (Vmem(t)) provides a useful internal signal for detecting distribution shifts. Simple per-channel statistics derived from these membrane dynamics enable OOD detection. To evaluate this approach, we introduce Gen1-C, an event-camera corruption benchmark developed upon the Prophesee Gen1 automotive detection dataset, containing six sensor-motivated histogram-level stress tests at five severity levels. We further propose the Multi-Descriptor Deviation (MDD), a corruption-blind method that operates on membrane-potential statistics. At the highest corruption severity, MDD achieves an AUROC of more than 0.88 on five of the six corruptions using only a bounded 64-frame observation window. Notably, the remaining corruption is also the one that has the smallest effect on the underlying detector. These results show that the temporal membrane-potential dynamics can provide an effective and low-cost signal for OOD detection in SNN-based event perception.