A Convolutional Layer Activation Dimensionality Reduction for Out-of-Distribution and Adversarial Attack Detection Methods

A new arXiv paper (2608.10203v1) introduces a convolutional layer activation dimensionality reduction method that improves out-of-distribution and adversarial attack detection in convolutional neural networks. The authors extend two state-of-the-art detection methods to use any dimensionality reduction and show their proposed method consistently outperforms or matches the strongest alternative while offering the highest compression, reducing computation and memory footprints.

arXiv:2608.10203v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Despite the success of convolutional neural networks in image classification tasks and their general application in multi-modal models, their susceptibility to out-of-distribution and adversarial attack samples raises concerns regarding trustworthiness and safety. Among the approaches to tackle such issues, detection methods that analyze the model's intermediate activations to estimate a confidence score are a promising family that evaluates the decision process, relying on a dimensionality reduction step to enable efficient downstream processing of the high-dimensional activations. However, when considering convolutional layers, the dimensionality reduction methods in the literature either lack a mechanism to control the compression/information-loss trade-off or yield large representations. In this paper, we carefully analyze two state-of-the-art detection methods and their dimensionality reductions for convolutional layers and develop a novel reduction method with a controllable high-compression level. We extend these two state-of-the-art detection methods, enabling the usage of any dimensionality reduction, and evaluate their performance on out-of-distribution and adversarial attack detection. Results show that the detection methods with the proposed dimensionality reduction consistently perform better than, or comparable to, the strongest alternative. Furthermore, the proposed method is shown to reduce computation and memory footprints, given that it has the highest compression among the compared methods.