LOOD: Localization-based Uncertainty Estimation for Medical Imaging (Spotlight #14)

Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs is a central challenge for safely deploying machine learning models in the real world. Existing solutions are mainly driven by small-scale natural image datasets and are far from readily usable for safety-critical domains such as medical imaging diagnosis. In this paper, we bridge this critical gap by proposing a localization-based OOD detection framework LOOD, which demonstrates substantial improvement over previous methods. Our key idea is to estimate the OOD score from a localized feature region that is highly indicative of the disease label, as opposed to averaging signals from all spatial locations. We achieve this by devising a specialized pooling mechanism termed selective pooling, which yields OOD scores that better distinguish between the in-distribution and OOD data. We evaluate the model trained on a large-scale clinical chest X-ray dataset against five diverse OOD datasets. LOOD establishes superior performance on this challenging task, reducing the average FPR95 by up to 57.83%.