Hyperdimensional Feature Fusion for Out-of-Distribution Detection

We introduce powerful ideas from Hyperdimensional Computing into the challenging field of Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection. In contrast to many existing works that perform OOD detection based on only a single layer of a neural network, we use similarity-preserving semi-orthogonal projection matrices to project the feature maps from multiple layers into a common vector space. By repeatedly applying the bundling operation , we create expressive class-specific descriptor vectors for all in-distribution classes. At test time, a simple and efficient cosine similarity calculation between descriptor vectors consistently identifies OOD samples with competitive performance to the current state-of-the-art whilst being significantly faster. We show that our method is orthogonal to recent state-of-the-art OOD detectors and can be combined with them to further improve upon the performance.