arXiv AI

What Drives the Inlier-Memorization Effect? A Theory of Outlier Detection via Early Training Dynamics

arXiv:2606. 29791v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Outlier detection (OD) aims to identify anomalous instances by learning the underlying structure of normal data (inliers), and is particularly challenging in fully unsupervised settings where no information about anomalies is available during training.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

Optimizing Three Critical Factors for Practical and Effective OOD Detection Fine-Tuning

The paper introduces a framework for out-of-distribution (OOD) detection that addresses the trade‑off between detection performance and classification accuracy caused by fine‑tuning with auxiliary outlier data. It optimizes three factors—model reminder, data sampling, and representation learning—by proposing Self‑Knowledge Distillation to preserve accuracy, Semi‑hard Outlier Sampling to enhance detection with minimal data, and Outlier‑aware Supervised Contrastive Learning to improve ID‑OOD separability. The combined approach yields cumulative gains, outperforming existing methods on diverse benchmarks, especially in long‑tailed scenarios, and offers a robust baseline for real‑world OOD detection.

By Hyunjun Choi, JaeHo Chung, Hawook Jeong
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 21

AOE: Exhaustive Out-of-Distribution Detection via Recalibrating Outlier Labels

arXiv:2605. 28021v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is essential for deploying machine learning models in open-world and safety-critical scenarios, where test inputs may deviate from the training distribution and overconfident predictions on unknown samples can lead to unreliable decisions.

By Fengqiang Wan, Qing-Yuan Jiang, Fu Shen, Yang Yang
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Differentiable Interval Bottlenecks for Interpretable Anomaly Detection in Numerical Data

DIFFINT is a reconstruction‑based anomaly detector that uses a differentiable autoencoder with a latent bottleneck composed of soft, axis‑aligned interval memberships. Each latent unit represents a human‑readable hyper‑rectangle in feature space, allowing the model to encode how strongly an instance falls inside each interval and to compute reconstruction error as the anomaly score. The method provides a certified lower bound on reconstruction error for points outside all active intervals, a suppression mechanism for sparse abnormalities, and a closed‑form, label‑free importance ranking for each (unit, feature) pair, achieving top performance on 48 ADBench benchmarks against 22 baselines.

By Lamine Diop, Marc Plantevit
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 3

Differentiable Interval Bottlenecks for Interpretable Anomaly Detection in Numerical Data

DIFFINT is a reconstruction‑based anomaly detector that replaces the opaque latent bottleneck of a standard autoencoder with a set of soft, axis‑aligned interval memberships learned directly from raw numerical data. Each latent unit represents a human‑readable hyper‑rectangle, and an instance’s anomaly score is its reconstruction error weighted by how strongly it falls inside these intervals. The method provides a certified lower bound on reconstruction error for points outside all active intervals, a graded suppression mechanism for sparse anomalies, and a closed‑form, label‑free importance ranking for each (unit, feature) pair, achieving top performance on 48 ADBench benchmarks against 22 baselines. whyItMatters":"DIFFINT offers the first interpretable anomaly detector that maintains competitive performance while revealing which feature ranges drive each anomaly score, enabling practitioners to audit and understand model decisions without requiring anomaly labels."

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23

Can We Predict Anomaly Detection Performance from Embedding-Space Geometry?

The paper investigates whether the performance of anomaly detection systems can be predicted without labeled anomalies. For kNN-based detectors, it derives a lower bound on AUC that links detection performance to the separation and variance of inlier and outlier scores, and uses this to analyze how density variation, intrinsic dimensionality, and domain mismatch affect score variability. The authors introduce pseudo‑anomaly probes that provide a reference for estimating relative score separation, and demonstrate through experiments on DCASE benchmarks that these probes enable anomaly‑free model selection to outperform conventional development‑set selection, especially under domain shift.

By Kevin Wilkinghoff, Zheng-Hua Tan
arXiv Computer Vision
3d ago

Beyond Normal References: Discriminative Few-Shot Anomaly Detection

This paper introduces IDEAL, a framework for few-shot anomaly detection that uses both normal and anomalous reference examples. IDEAL suppresses irrelevant normal variations and encodes intrinsic deviation vectors that capture discriminative anomaly directions. Experiments on eight real-world datasets show that IDEAL generalizes to unseen anomalies and outperforms existing methods.

By Huan Wang, Jun Shen, Jun Yan, Guansong Pang