A Online Statistical Framework for Out-of-Distribution Detection

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection task is significant in reliable and safety-critical applications. Existing approaches primarily focus on developing the powerful score function, but overlook the design of decision-making rules based on these score function. In contrast to prior studies, we rethink the OOD detection task from an perspective of online multiple hypothesis testing. We then propose a novel generalized LOND (g-LOND) algorithm to solve the above problem. Theoretically, the g-LOND algorithm controls false discovery rate (FDR) at pre-specified level without the consideration for the dependence between the p-values. Furthermore, we prove that the false positive rate (FPR) of the g-LOND algorithm converges to zero in probability based on the generalized Gaussian-like distribution family. Finally, the extensive experimental results verify the effectiveness of g-LOND algorithm for OOD detection.

Different from previous literature which focuses on score functions, this paper aims to provide a statistical decision-making framework with strong theoretical guarantee and well empirical performance.