arXiv:2507.01831cs.LGstat.ML2025-07被引 16

现有异常检测方法根本搞错了问题,导致误判频发。

Out-of-Distribution Detection Methods Answer the Wrong Questions

  • 用模型不确定度或特征距离判断异常,思路本身有缺陷
  • 高不确定或远距离特征未必是异常数据,存在不可消除的误判
  • 适合关注模型安全但需警惕误报的研究者阅读

为检测分布偏移并提升模型安全性,许多异常检测方法依赖于在分布内数据上训练的监督模型的预测不确定性或特征。本文批判性地重新审视这一主流方法,认为其根本上回答了错误的问题。仅在分布内类别上训练的分类器无法有效识别分布外样本:例如猫狗分类器可能因具备区分猫狗的特征而自信误判飞机图像,尽管二者外观差异巨大。我们发现基于不确定性的方法错误地将高不确定性等同于分布外,而基于特征的方法错误地将特征空间中的远距离视为分布外。这些缺陷导致异常检测中存在不可消除的错误,并揭示了方法失效的常见场景。此外,改进措施如特征-逻辑混合、模型与数据规模扩展、认知不确定性建模及异常暴露等,均未能解决目标错位的根本问题。我们还考察了无监督密度估计和生成模型在异常检测中的应用,指出其同样存在基础性局限。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

To detect distribution shifts and improve model safety, many out-of-distribution (OOD) detection methods rely on the predictive uncertainty or features of supervised models trained on in-distribution data. In this paper, we critically re-examine this popular family of OOD detection procedures, and we argue that these methods are fundamentally answering the wrong questions for OOD detection. There is no simple fix to this misalignment, since a classifier trained only on in-distribution classes cannot be expected to identify OOD points; for instance, a cat-dog classifier may confidently misclassify an airplane if it contains features that distinguish cats from dogs, despite generally appearing nothing alike. We find that uncertainty-based methods incorrectly conflate high uncertainty with being OOD, while feature-based methods incorrectly conflate far feature-space distance with being OOD. We show how these pathologies manifest as irreducible errors in OOD detection and identify common settings where these methods are ineffective. Additionally, interventions to improve OOD detection such as feature-logit hybrid methods, scaling of model and data size, epistemic uncertainty representation, and outlier exposure also fail to address this fundamental misalignment in objectives. We additionally consider unsupervised density estimation and generative models for OOD detection, which we show have their own fundamental limitations.

异常检测模型安全分布外

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