FLatS: Principled Out-of-Distribution Detection with Feature-Based Likelihood Ratio Score

Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) instances is crucial for NLP models in practical applications. Although numerous OOD detection methods exist, most of them are empirical. Backed by theoretical analysis, this paper advocates for the measurement of the "OOD-ness" of a test case x through the likelihood ratio between out-distribution Pout and in-distribution P-in. We argue that the state-of-the-art (SOTA) feature-based OOD detection methods, such as Maha (Lee et al., 2018) and KNN (Sun et al., 2022), are suboptimal since they only estimate in-distribution density p(in)(x). To address this issue, we propose FLatS, a principled solution for OOD detection based on likelihood ratio. Moreover, we demonstrate that FLatS can serve as a general framework capable of enhancing other OOD detection methods by incorporating out-distribution density p(out)(x) estimation. Experiments show that FLatS establishes a new SOTA on popular benchmarks.