In or Out? Fixing ImageNet Out-of-Distribution Detection Evaluation
Julian Bitterwolf Maximilian Müller Matthias Hein
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is the problem of identifying inputs
which are unrelated to the in-distribution task. The OOD detection performance
when the in-distribution (ID) is ImageNet-1K is commonly being tested on a
small range of test OOD datasets. We find that most of the currently used test
OOD datasets, including datasets from the open set recognition (OSR)
literature, have severe issues: In some cases more than 50$\%$ of the dataset
contains objects belonging to one of the ID classes. These erroneous samples
heavily distort the evaluation of OOD detectors. As a solution, we introduce
with NINCO a novel test OOD dataset, each sample checked to be ID free, which
with its fine-grained range of OOD classes allows for a detailed analysis of an
OOD detector's strengths and failure modes, particularly when paired with a
number of synthetic "OOD unit-tests". We provide detailed evaluations across a
large set of architectures and OOD detection methods on NINCO and the
unit-tests, revealing new insights about model weaknesses and the effects of
pretraining on OOD detection performance. We provide code and data at
https://github.com/j-cb/NINCO.