Self-supervised Novelty Detection for Continual Learning: A Gradient-Based Approach Boosted by Binary Classification

Abstract

Novelty detection aims to automatically identify out of distribution (OOD) data, without any prior knowledge of them. It is a critical step in continual learning, in order to sense the arrival of new data and initialize the learning process. Conventional methods of OOD detection perform multi-variate analysis on an ensemble of data or features, and usually resort to the supervision with OOD data to improve the accuracy. In reality, such supervision is impractical as one cannot anticipate the anomalous data. In this paper, we propose a novel, self-supervised approach that does not rely on any pre-defined OOD data: (1) The new method evaluates the Mahalanobis distance of the gradients between the in-distribution and OOD data. (2) It is assisted by a self-supervised binary classifier to guide the label selection to generate the gradients, and maximize the Mahalanobis distance. In the evaluation with multiple datasets, such as CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN and ImageNet, the proposed approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art supervised and unsupervised methods in the area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC). We further demonstrate that this detector is able to accurately learn one OOD class in continual learning.