Image-based Outlier Synthesis With Training Data

Sudarshan Regmi; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 39338-39350

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is critical to ensure the safe deployment of deep learning models in critical applications. Deep learning models can often misidentify OOD samples as in-distribution (ID) samples. This vulnerability worsens in the presence of spurious correlation in the training set. Likewise, in fine-grained classification settings, detection of fine-grained OOD samples becomes inherently challenging due to their high similarity to ID samples. However, current research on OOD detection has focused instead largely on relatively easier (conventional) cases. Even the few recent works addressing these challenging cases rely on carefully curated or synthesized outliers, ultimately requiring external data. This motivates our central research question: "Can we innovate OOD detection training framework for fine-grained and spurious settings without requiring any external data at all?" In this work, we present a unified Approach to Spurious, fine-grained, and Conventional OOD Detection (\ASCOOD) that eliminates the reliance on external data. First, we synthesize virtual outliers from ID data by approximating the destruction of invariant features. Specifically, we propose to add gradient attribution values to ID inputs to disrupt invariant features while amplifying true-class logit, thereby synthesizing challenging near-manifold virtual outliers. Then, we simultaneously incentivize ID classification and predictive uncertainty towards virtual outliers. For this, we further propose to leverage standardized features with z-score normalization. ASCOOD effectively mitigates impact of spurious correlations and encourages capturing fine-grained attributes. Extensive experiments across 7 datasets and comparisons with 30+ methods demonstrate merit of ASCOOD in spurious, fine-grained and conventional settings.