Toward a Realistic Benchmark for Out-of-Distribution Detection

Deep neural networks are increasingly used in a wide range of technologies and services, but remain highly susceptible to out-of-distribution (OOD) samples, that is, drawn from a different distribution than the original training set. A common approach to address this issue is to endow deep neural networks with the ability to detect OOD samples. Several benchmarks have been proposed to design and validate OOD detection techniques. However, many of them are based on far-OOD samples drawn from very different distributions, and thus lack the complexity needed to capture the nuances of real-world scenarios. In this work, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark for OOD detection, based on ImageNet and Places365, that assigns individual classes as in-distribution or out-of-distribution depending on the semantic similarity with the training set. Several techniques can be used to determine which classes should be considered in-distribution, yielding benchmarks with varying properties. Experimental results on different OOD detection techniques show how their measured efficacy depends on the selected benchmark and how confidence-based techniques may outperform classifier-based ones on near-OOD samples.