WeShort: Out-of-distribution Detection With Weak Shortcut structure

Abstract: Neural networks have achieved impressive performance for data in the distribution which is the same as the training set but can produce an overconfident incorrect result for the data these networks have never seen. Therefore, it is essential to detect whether inputs come from out-of-distribution(OOD) in order to guarantee the safety of neural networks deployed in the real world. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective post-hoc technique, WeShort, to reduce the overconfidence of neural networks on OOD data. Our method is inspired by the observation of the internal residual structure, which shows the separation of the OOD and in-distribution (ID) data in the shortcut layer. Our method is compatible with different OOD detection scores and can generalize well to different architectures of networks. We demonstrate our method on various OOD datasets to show its competitive performances and provide reasonable hypotheses to explain why our method works. On the ImageNet benchmark, Weshort achieves state-of-the-art performance on the false positive rate (FPR95) and the area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC) on the family of post-hoc methods.