Papers › On Out-of-distribution Detection with Energy-based Models

On Out-of-distribution Detection with Energy-based Models

3 Jul 2021arXiv:2107.08785archive 2025-07-28

Sven Elflein, Bertrand Charpentier, Daniel Zügner, Stephan Günnemann

Several density estimation methods have shown to fail to detect out-of-distribution (OOD) samples by assigning higher likelihoods to anomalous data. Energy-based models (EBMs) are flexible, unnormalized density models which seem to be able to improve upon this failure mode. In this work, we provide an extensive study investigating OOD detection with EBMs trained with different approaches on tabular and image data and find that EBMs do not provide consistent advantages. We hypothesize that EBMs do not learn semantic features despite their discriminative structure similar to Normalizing Flows. To verify this hypotheses, we show that supervision and architectural restrictions improve the OOD detection of EBMs independent of the training approach.

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selflein/EBM-OOD-Detection officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Density EstimationOut of Distribution (OOD) DetectionOut-of-Distribution Detection

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Normalizing Flows

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