Title: AdaSCALE: Adaptive Scaling for OOD detection
Primary area: alignment, fairness, safety, privacy, and societal considerations
Keywords: OOD Detection

Abstract: The ability of the deep learning model to recognize when a sample falls outside its learned distribution is critical for safe and reliable deployment. Recent state-of-the-art out-of-distribution (OOD) detection methods leverage activation shaping to improve the separation between in-distribution (ID) and OOD inputs. These approaches resort to sample-specific scaling but apply a static percentile threshold across all samples regardless of their nature. In this work, we propose AdaSCALE, an adaptive scaling procedure that dynamically adjusts the percentile threshold based on a sample's estimated OOD likelihood. This estimation leverages our key observation that OOD samples exhibit significantly more pronounced activation shifts at high-magnitude activations under minor perturbation compared to ID samples. AdaSCALE enables stronger scaling for likely ID samples and weaker scaling for likely OOD samples, creating highly separable energy scores. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art OOD detection performance, outperforming the latest rival OptFS by **14.94%** in near-OOD and **21.67%** in far-OOD datasets in average FPR@95 metric in the ImageNet-1k benchmark across eight diverse architectures.