Understanding Anomaly Detection with Deep Invertible Networks through Hierarchies of Distributions and Features

Deep generative networks trained via maximum likelihood on a natural image dataset like CIFAR10 often assign high likelihoods to images from datasets with different objects (e.g., SVHN). We refine previous investigations of this failure at anomaly detection for invertible generative networks and provide a clear explanation of it as a combination of model bias and domain prior: Convolutional networks learn similar low-level feature distributions when trained on any natural image dataset and these low-level features dominate the likelihood. Hence, when the discriminative features between inliers and outliers are on a high-level, e.g., object shapes, anomaly detection becomes particularly challenging. To remove the negative impact of model bias and domain prior on detecting high-level differences, we propose two methods, first, using the log likelihood ratios of two identical models, one trained on the in-distribution data (e.g., CIFAR10) and the other one on a more general distribution of images (e.g., 80 Million Tiny Images). We also derive a novel outlier loss for the in-distribution network on samples from the more general distribution to further improve the performance. Secondly, using a multi-scale model like Glow, we show that low-level features are mainly captured at early scales. Therefore, using only the likelihood contribution of the final scale performs remarkably well for detecting high-level feature differences of the out-of-distribution and the in-distribution. This method is especially useful if one does not have access to a suitable general distribution. Overall, our methods achieve strong anomaly detection performance in the unsupervised setting, reaching comparable performance as state-of-the-art classifier-based methods in the supervised setting.