TriScore: Post-Hoc Out-of-Distribution Detection with Energy, Boundary Probes, and Transform Consistency

arXiv:2610.26323 · cs.CV, cs.LG · Submitted 2026-10-19 · Read on arXiv

cs.CV, cs.LG

Submitted: 2026-10-19

Updated: 2026-10-19

Journal ref: Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), September 2026

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Post-hoc out-of-distribution detection usually relies on a single signal extracted from a frozen classifier, such as confidence, energy, features, or gradients.

Terminology

Abstract

Post-hoc out-of-distribution detection usually relies on a single signal extracted from a frozen classifier, such as confidence, energy, features, or gradients. This dependence becomes fragile under classifier-level adversarial shift, where the shift can preserve the detector's chosen cue while changing the model's decision behavior. We investigate whether this failure mode can be mitigated by combining complementary detection criteria instead of selecting a single score. We introduce TriScore, a post-hoc OOD detector that combines three ID-calibrated signals from the same frozen backbone: an energy prior, a boundary-fragility score, and a transform-consistency score. These signals are standardized on ID validation data and fused by an input-dependent ID-residual gate, requiring no OOD labels, auxiliary model, training, or stored feature bank. Across four ImageNet-scale backbones, TriScore achieves the best mean AUROC among 15 post-hoc baselines under a non-adaptive adversarial-shift protocol, while remaining competitive on standard OOD benchmarks. Ablations show that the gains come from combining complementary cues rather than optimizing a single detector signal. These results support multi-criterion post-hoc detection as a practical route toward more robust OOD detection under classifier-level shift. The source code is publicly available at github.com/gursoyege/TriScore.

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