An Information Theoretical View for Out-Of-Distribution Detection

Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs are pivotal for real-world applications. However, due to the inaccessibility of OODs during training phase, applying supervised binary classification with in-distribution (ID) and OOD labels is not feasible. Therefore, previous works typically employ the proxy ID classification task to learn feature representation for OOD detection task. In this study, we delve into the relationship between the two tasks through the lens of Information Theory. Our analysis reveals that optimizing the classification objective could inevitably cause the over-confidence and undesired compression of OOD detection-relevant information. To address these two problems, we propose OOD Entropy Regularization (OER) to regularize the information captured in classification-oriented representation learning for detecting OOD samples. Both theoretical analyses and experimental results underscore the consistent improvement of OER on OOD detection.