CADet: Fully Self-Supervised Anomaly Detection With Contrastive Learning

Abstract

Handling out-of-distribution (OOD) samples has become a major stake in the realworld deployment of machine learning systems. This work explores the application of self-supervised contrastive learning to the simultaneous detection of two types of OOD samples: unseen classes and adversarial perturbations. Since in practice the distribution of such samples is not known in advance, we do not assume access to OOD examples. We show that similarity functions trained with contrastive learning can be leveraged with the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) two-sample test to verify whether two independent sets of samples are drawn from the same distribution. Inspired by this approach, we introduce CADet (Contrastive Anomaly Detection), a method based on image augmentations to perform anomaly detection on single samples. CADet compares favorably to adversarial detection methods to detect adversarially perturbed samples on ImageNet. Simultaneously, it achieves comparable performance to unseen label detection methods on two challenging benchmarks: ImageNet-O and iNaturalist. CADet is fully self-supervised and requires neither labels for in-distribution samples nor access to OOD examples. IntroductionWhile modern machine learning systems have achieved countless successful real-world applications, handling out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs remains a tough challenge of significant importance. The problem is especially acute for high-dimensional problems like image classification. Models are typically trained in a close-world setting but inevitably faced with novel input classes when deployed in the real world. The impact can range from displeasing customer experience to dire consequences in the case of safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving (Kitt et al., 2010) Preprint. Under review.