ICML2025

Improving Out-of-Distribution Detection with Markov Logic Networks

Konstantin Kirchheim, Frank Ortmeier

Abstract

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is essential for ensuring the reliability of deep learning models operating in open-world scenarios. Current OOD detectors mainly rely on statistical models to identify unusual patterns in the latent representations of a deep neural network. This work proposes to augment existing OOD detectors with probabilistic reasoning, utilizing Markov logic networks (MLNs). MLNs connect first-order logic with probabilistic reasoning to assign probabilities to inputs based on weighted logical constraints defined over humanunderstandable concepts, which offers improved explainability. Through extensive experiments on multiple datasets, we demonstrate that MLNs can significantly enhance the performance of a wide range of existing OOD detectors while maintaining computational efficiency. Furthermore, we introduce a simple algorithm for learning logical constraints for OOD detection from a dataset and showcase its effectiveness.