OATML

Entropy of a predictive distribution averaged over an ensemble or several posterior weight samples is often used as a metric for Out-of-Distribution (OoD) detection. However, we show that predictive entropy is inappropriate for this task because it mistakes ambiguous in-distribution samples as OoD. This issue remains hidden on curated datasets commonly used for benchmarking. We introduce a new dataset, Dirty-MNIST, with a long tail of ambiguous samples, which exemplifies this problem. Additionally, we look at the entropy of single, deterministic, softmax models and show that it is unreliable exactly for OoD samples. In summary, we caution against using predictive or softmax entropy for OoD detection in practice and introduce several methods to evaluate the quantitative difference between several uncertainty metrics.