A Focus on Important Samples for Out-of-Distribution Detection

To ensure the reliability and security of machine learning classification models when deployed in the open world, it is crucial that these models can detect out-of-distribution (OOD) data that exhibits semantic shifts from the in-distribution (ID) data used during training. This necessity has spurred extensive research on OOD detection. Previous methods required a large amount of finely labeled OOD data for model training, which is costly or performed poorly in open-world scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose a novel method named focus on important samples (FIS) in this paper. FIS leverages model-predicted OOD scores to identify and focus on important samples that are more beneficial for model training. By learning from these important samples, our method aims to achieve reliable OOD detection performance while reducing training costs and the risk of overfitting training data, thereby enabling the model to better distinguish between ID and OOD data. Extensive experiments across diverse OOD detection scenarios demonstrate that FIS achieves superior performance compared to existing approaches, highlighting its robust and efficient OOD detection performance in practical applications.