Revisit Overconfidence for OOD Detection: Reassigned Contrastive Learning with Adaptive Class-dependent Threshold

Abstract

Detecting Out-of-Domain (OOD) or unknown intents from user queries is essential in a task-oriented dialog system. A key challenge of OOD detection is the overconfidence of neural models. In this paper, we comprehensively analyze overconfidence and classify it into two perspectives: over-confident OOD and in-domain (IND). Then according to intrinsic reasons, we respectively propose a novel reassigned contrastive learning (RCL) to discriminate IND intents for over-confident OOD and an adaptive class-dependent local threshold mechanism to separate similar IND and OOD intents for over-confident IND. Experiments and analyses show the effectiveness of our proposed method for both aspects of overconfidence issues.