Meta-learning for Out-of-Distribution Detection via Density Estimation in Latent Space

Abstract: Many neural network-based out-of-distribution (OoD) detection methods have been proposed. However, they require many training data for each target task. We propose a simple yet effective meta-learning method to detect OoD with small in-distribution data in a target task. With the proposed method, the OoD detection is performed by density estimation in a latent space. A neural network shared among all tasks is used to flexibly map instances in the original space to the latent space. The neural network is meta-learned such that the expected OoD detection performance is improved by using various tasks that are different from the target tasks. This meta-learning procedure enables us to obtain appropriate representations in the latent space for OoD detection. For density estimation, we use a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) with full covariance for each class. We can adapt the GMM parameters to in-distribution data in each task in a closed form by maximizing the likelihood. Since the closed form solution is differentiable, we can meta-learn the neural network efficiently with a stochastic gradient descent method by incorporating the solution into the meta-learning objective function. In experiments using six datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed method achieves better performance than existing meta-learning and OoD detection methods.