Antonio Ortega


2024

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Out-of-Distribution Detection through Soft Clustering with Non-Negative Kernel Regression
Aryan Gulati | Xingjian Dong | Carlos Hurtado | Sarath Shekkizhar | Swabha Swayamdipta | Antonio Ortega
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024

As language models become more general purpose, increased attention needs to be paid to detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) instances, i.e., those not belonging to any of the distributions seen during training. Existing methods for detecting OOD data are computationally complex and storage-intensive. We propose a novel soft clustering approach for OOD detection based on non-negative kernel regression. Our approach greatly reduces computational and space complexities (up to 11× improvement in inference time and 87% reduction in storage requirements). It outperforms existing approaches by up to 4 AUROC points on four benchmarks. We also introduce an entropy-constrained version of our algorithm, leading to further reductions in storage requirements (up to 97% lower than comparable approaches) while retaining competitive performance. Our soft clustering approach for OOD detection highlights its potential for detecting tail-end phenomena in extreme-scale data settings. Our source code is available on Github.