{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/neco-neural-collapse-based-out-of","title":"NECO: NEural Collapse Based Out-of-distribution detection","arxiv_id":"2310.06823","date":"2023-10-10","proceeding":null,"authors":["Mouïn Ben Ammar","Nacim Belkhir","Sebastian Popescu","Antoine Manzanera","Gianni Franchi"],"abstract":"Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) data is a critical challenge in machine learning due to model overconfidence, often without awareness of their epistemological limits. We hypothesize that ``neural collapse'', a phenomenon affecting in-distribution data for models trained beyond loss convergence, also influences OOD data. To benefit from this interplay, we introduce NECO, a novel post-hoc method for OOD detection, which leverages the geometric properties of ``neural collapse'' and of principal component spaces to identify OOD data. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that NECO achieves state-of-the-art results on both small and large-scale OOD detection tasks while exhibiting strong generalization capabilities across different network architectures. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical explanation for the effectiveness of our method in OOD detection. Code is available at https://gitlab.com/drti/neco","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.06823v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.06823v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"neco-neural-collapse-based-out-of","repo_url":"https://gitlab.com/drti/neco","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"out-of-distribution-detection","task_name":"Out-of-Distribution Detection"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2310.06823","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}