Background Matters: Enhancing Out-of-distribution Detection with Domain Features

Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs is a principal task for ensuring the safety of deploying deep-neural-network classifiers in open-world scenarios. OOD samples can be drawn from arbitrary distributions and exhibit deviations from in-distribution (ID) data in various dimensions, such as foreground semantic features (e.g., vehicle images vs. ID samples in fruit classification) and background domain features (e.g., textural images vs. ID samples in object recognition). Existing methods focus on detecting OOD samples based on the semantic features, while neglecting the other dimensions such as the domain features. This paper considers the importance of the domain features in OOD detection and proposes to leverage them to enhance the semantic-feature-based OOD detection methods. To this end, we propose a novel generic framework that can learn the domain features from the ID training samples by a dense prediction approach, with which different existing semantic-feature-based OOD detection methods can be seamlessly combined to jointly learn the in-distribution features from both the semantic and domain dimensions. Extensive experiments show that our approach 1) can substantially enhance the performance of four different state-of-the-art (SotA) OOD detection methods on multiple widely-used OOD datasets with diverse domain features, and 2) achieves new SotA performance on these benchmarks.

Affinity Uncertainty-based Hard Negative Mining in Graph Contrastive Learning

Hard negative mining has shown effective in enhancing self-supervised contrastive learning (CL) on diverse data types, including graph contrastive learning (GCL). Existing hardness-aware CL methods typically treat negative instances that are most similar to the anchor instance as hard negatives, which helps improve the CL performance, especially on image data. However, this approach often fails to identify the hard negatives but leads to many false negatives on graph data. This is mainly due to that the learned graph representations are not sufficiently discriminative due to over-smooth representations and/or non-i.i.d. issues in graph data. To tackle this problem, this paper proposes a novel approach that builds a discriminative model on collective affinity information (i.e, two sets of pairwise affinities between the negative instances and the anchor instance) to mine hard negatives in GCL. In particular, the proposed approach evaluates how confident/uncertain the discriminative model is about the affinity of each negative instance to an anchor instance to determine its hardness weight relative to the anchor instance. This uncertainty information is then incorporated into existing GCL loss functions via a weighting term to enhance their performance. The enhanced GCL is theoretically grounded that the resulting GCL loss is equivalent to a triplet loss with an adaptive margin being exponentially proportional to the learned uncertainty of each negative instance. Extensive experiments on 10 graph datasets show that our approach i) consistently enhances different state-of-the-art GCL methods in both graph and node classification tasks, and ii) significantly improves their robustness against adversarial attacks.

Subgraph Centralization: A Necessary Step for Graph Anomaly Detection

Graph anomaly detection has attracted a lot of interest recently. Despite their successes, existing detectors have at least two of the three weaknesses: (a) high computational cost which limits them to small-scale networks only; (b) existing treatment of subgraphs produces suboptimal detection accuracy; and (c) unable to provide an explanation as to why a node is anomalous, once it is identified. We identify that the root cause of these weaknesses is a lack of a proper treatment for subgraphs. A treatment called Subgraph Centralization for graph anomaly detection is proposed to address all the above weaknesses. Its importance is shown in two ways. First, we present a simple yet effective new framework called Graph-Centric Anomaly Detection (GCAD). The key advantages of GCAD over existing detectors including deep-learning detectors are: (i) better anomaly detection accuracy; (ii) linear time complexity with respect to the number of nodes; and (iii) it is a generic framework that admits an existing point anomaly detector to be used to detect node anomalies in a network. Second, we show that Subgraph Centralization can be incorporated into two existing detectors to overcome the above-mentioned weaknesses.

Cross-Domain Graph Anomaly Detection via Anomaly-aware Contrastive Alignment

Cross-domain graph anomaly detection (CD-GAD) describes the problem of detecting anomalous nodes in an unlabelled target graph using auxiliary, related source graphs with labelled anomalous and normal nodes. Although it presents a promising approach to address the notoriously high false positive issue in anomaly detection, little work has been done in this line of research. There are numerous domain adaptation methods in the literature, but it is difficult to adapt them for GAD due to the unknown distributions of the anomalies and the complex node relations embedded in graph data. To this end, we introduce a novel domain adaptation approach, namely Anomaly-aware Contrastive alignmenT (ACT), for GAD. ACT is designed to jointly optimise: (i) unsupervised contrastive learning of normal representations of nodes in the target graph, and (ii) anomaly-aware one-class alignment that aligns these contrastive node representations and the representations of labelled normal nodes in the source graph, while enforcing significant deviation of the representations of the normal nodes from the labelled anomalous nodes in the source graph. In doing so, ACT effectively transfers anomaly-informed knowledge from the source graph to learn the complex node relations of the normal class for GAD on the target graph without any specification of the anomaly distributions. Extensive experiments on eight CD-GAD settings demonstrate that our approach ACT achieves substantially improved detection performance over 10 state-of-the-art GAD methods. Code is available at https://github.com/QZ-WANG/ACT.

Residual Pattern Learning for Pixel-wise Out-of-Distribution Detection in Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation models classify pixels into a set of known (``in-distribution'') visual classes. When deployed in an open world, the reliability of these models depends on their ability not only to classify in-distribution pixels but also to detect out-of-distribution (OoD) pixels. Historically, the poor OoD detection performance of these models has motivated the design of methods based on model re-training using synthetic training images that include OoD visual objects. Although successful, these re-trained methods have two issues: 1) their in-distribution segmentation accuracy may drop during re-training, and 2) their OoD detection accuracy does not generalise well to new contexts (e.g., country surroundings) outside the training set (e.g., city surroundings). In this paper, we mitigate these issues with: (i) a new residual pattern learning (RPL) module that assists the segmentation model to detect OoD pixels without affecting the inlier segmentation performance; and (ii) a novel context-robust contrastive learning (CoroCL) that enforces RPL to robustly detect OoD pixels among various contexts. Our approach improves by around 10\% FPR and 7\% AuPRC the previous state-of-the-art in Fishyscapes, Segment-Me-If-You-Can, and RoadAnomaly datasets. Our code is available at: https://github.com/yyliu01/RPL.

Calibrated One-class Classification for Unsupervised Time Series Anomaly Detection

Unsupervised time series anomaly detection is instrumental in monitoring and alarming potential faults of target systems in various domains. Current state-of-the-art time series anomaly detectors mainly focus on devising advanced neural network structures and new reconstruction/prediction learning objectives to learn data normality (normal patterns and behaviors) as accurately as possible. However, these one-class learning methods can be deceived by unknown anomalies in the training data (i.e., anomaly contamination). Further, their normality learning also lacks knowledge about the anomalies of interest. Consequently, they often learn a biased, inaccurate normality boundary. This paper proposes a novel one-class learning approach, named calibrated one-class classification, to tackle this problem. Our one-class classifier is calibrated in two ways: (1) by adaptively penalizing uncertain predictions, which helps eliminate the impact of anomaly contamination while accentuating the predictions that the one-class model is confident in, and (2) by discriminating the normal samples from native anomaly examples that are generated to simulate genuine time series abnormal behaviors on the basis of original data. These two calibrations result in contamination-tolerant, anomaly-informed one-class learning, yielding a significantly improved normality modeling. Extensive experiments on six real-world datasets show that our model substantially outperforms twelve state-of-the-art competitors and obtains 6% - 31% F1 score improvement. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/xuhongzuo/couta}.

Deep Isolation Forest for Anomaly Detection

Isolation forest (iForest) has been emerging as arguably the most popular anomaly detector in recent years. It iteratively performs axis-parallel data space partition in a tree structure to isolate deviated data objects from the other data, with the isolation difficulty of the objects defined as anomaly scores. iForest shows effective performance across popular dataset benchmarks, but its axis-parallel-based linear data partition is ineffective in handling hard anomalies in high-dimensional/non-linear-separable data space, and even worse, it leads to a notorious algorithmic bias that assigns unexpectedly large anomaly scores to artefact regions. There have been several extensions of iForest, but they still focus on linear data partition, failing to effectively isolate those hard anomalies. This paper introduces a novel extension of iForest, deep isolation forest. Our method offers a comprehensive isolation method that can arbitrarily partition the data at any random direction and angle on subspaces of any size, effectively avoiding the algorithmic bias in the linear partition. Further, it requires only randomly initialised neural networks (i.e., no optimisation is required in our method) to ensure the freedom of the partition. In doing so, desired randomness and diversity in both random network-based representations and random partition-based isolation can be fully leveraged to significantly enhance the isolation ensemble-based anomaly detection. Also, our approach offers a data-type-agnostic anomaly detection solution. It is versatile to detect anomalies in different types of data by simply plugging in corresponding randomly initialised neural networks in the feature mapping. Extensive empirical results on a large collection of real-world datasets show that our model achieves substantial improvement over state-of-the-art isolation-based and non-isolation-based anomaly detection models.

Catching Both Gray and Black Swans: Open-set Supervised Anomaly Detection

Despite most existing anomaly detection studies assume the availability of normal training samples only, a few labeled anomaly examples are often available in many real-world applications, such as defect samples identified during random quality inspection, lesion images confirmed by radiologists in daily medical screening, etc. These anomaly examples provide valuable knowledge about the application-specific abnormality, enabling significantly improved detection of similar anomalies in some recent models. However, those anomalies seen during training often do not illustrate every possible class of anomaly, rendering these models ineffective in generalizing to unseen anomaly classes. This paper tackles open-set supervised anomaly detection, in which we learn detection models using the anomaly examples with the objective to detect both seen anomalies (`gray swans') and unseen anomalies (`black swans'). We propose a novel approach that learns disentangled representations of abnormalities illustrated by seen anomalies, pseudo anomalies, and latent residual anomalies (i.e., samples that have unusual residuals compared to the normal data in a latent space), with the last two abnormalities designed to detect unseen anomalies. Extensive experiments on nine real-world anomaly detection datasets show superior performance of our model in detecting seen and unseen anomalies under diverse settings. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/choubo/DRA.

Contrastive Transformer-based Multiple Instance Learning for Weakly Supervised Polyp Frame Detection

Current polyp detection methods from colonoscopy videos use exclusively normal (i.e., healthy) training images, which i) ignore the importance of temporal information in consecutive video frames, and ii) lack knowledge about the polyps. Consequently, they often have high detection errors, especially on challenging polyp cases (e.g., small, flat, or partially visible polyps). In this work, we formulate polyp detection as a weakly-supervised anomaly detection task that uses video-level labelled training data to detect frame-level polyps. In particular, we propose a novel convolutional transformer-based multiple instance learning method designed to identify abnormal frames (i.e., frames with polyps) from anomalous videos (i.e., videos containing at least one frame with polyp). In our method, local and global temporal dependencies are seamlessly captured while we simultaneously optimise video and snippet-level anomaly scores. A contrastive snippet mining method is also proposed to enable an effective modelling of the challenging polyp cases. The resulting method achieves a detection accuracy that is substantially better than current state-of-the-art approaches on a new large-scale colonoscopy video dataset introduced in this work.

Unsupervised Anomaly Detection in Medical Images with a Memory-augmented Multi-level Cross-attentional Masked Autoencoder

Unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD) aims to find anomalous images by optimising a detector using a training set that contains only normal images. UAD approaches can be based on reconstruction methods, self-supervised approaches, and Imagenet pre-trained models. Reconstruction methods, which detect anomalies from image reconstruction errors, are advantageous because they do not rely on the design of problem-specific pretext tasks needed by self-supervised approaches, and on the unreliable translation of models pre-trained from non-medical datasets. However, reconstruction methods may fail because they can have low reconstruction errors even for anomalous images. In this paper, we introduce a new reconstruction-based UAD approach that addresses this low-reconstruction error issue for anomalous images. Our UAD approach, the memory-augmented multi-level cross-attentional masked autoencoder (MemMC-MAE), is a transformer-based approach, consisting of a novel memory-augmented self-attention operator for the encoder and a new multi-level cross-attention operator for the decoder. MemMC-MAE masks large parts of the input image during its reconstruction, reducing the risk that it will produce low reconstruction errors because anomalies are likely to be masked and cannot be reconstructed. However, when the anomaly is not masked, then the normal patterns stored in the encoder's memory combined with the decoder's multi-level cross-attention will constrain the accurate reconstruction of the anomaly. We show that our method achieves SOTA anomaly detection and localisation on colonoscopy and Covid-19 Chest X-ray datasets.