Deep Hybrid Models for Out-of-Distribution Detection

We propose a principled and practical method for out-of-distribution (OoD) detection with deep hybrid models (DHMs), which model the joint density p(x, y) of features and labels with a single forward pass. By factorizing the joint density p(x, y) into three sources of uncertainty, we show that our approach has the ability to identify samples semantically different from the training data. To ensure computational scalability, we add a weight normalization step during training, which enables us to plug in state-of-the-art (SoTA) deep neural network (DNN) architectures for approximately modeling and inferring expressive probability distributions. Our method provides an efficient, general, and flexible framework for predictive uncertainty estimation with promising results and theoretical support. To our knowledge, this is the first work to reach 100% in OoD detection tasks on both vision and language datasets, especially on notably difficult dataset pairs such as CIFAR -10 vs. SVHN and CIFAR-100 vs. CIFAR-10. This work is a step towards enabling DNNs in real-world deployment for safety-critical applications.