Diffusion Denoising Process for Perceptron Bias in Out-of-distribution Detection

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is an important task to ensure the reliability and safety of deep learning and the discriminator models outperform others for now. However, the feature extraction of the discriminator models must compress the data and lose certain information, leaving room for bad cases and malicious attacks. In this paper, we provide a new assumption that the discriminator models are more sensitive to some subareas of the input space and such perceptron bias causes bad cases and overconfidence areas. Under this assumption, we design new detection methods and indicator scores. For detection methods, we introduce diffusion models (DMs) into OOD detection. We find that the diffusion denoising process (DDP) of DMs also functions as a novel form of asymmetric interpolation, which is suitable to enhance the input and reduce the overconfidence areas. For indicator scores, we find that the features of the discriminator models of OOD inputs occur sharp changes under DDP and use the norm of this dynamic change as our indicator scores. Therefore, we develop a new framework to combine the discriminator and generation models to do OOD detection under our new assumption. The discriminator models provide proper detection spaces and the generation models reduce the overconfidence problem. According to our experiments on CIFAR10 and CIFAR100, our methods get competitive results with state-of-the-art methods. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/luping-liu/DiffOOD.