Models trained for classification often assume that all testing classes are
known while training. As a result, when presented with an unknown class during
testing, such closed-set assumption forces the model to classify it as one of
the known classes. However, in a real world scenario, classification models are
likely to encounter such examples. Hence, identifying those examples as unknown
becomes critical to model performance. A potential solution to overcome this
problem lies in a class of learning problems known as open-set recognition. It
refers to the problem of identifying the unknown classes during testing, while
maintaining performance on the known classes. In this paper, we propose an
open-set recognition algorithm using class conditioned auto-encoders with novel
training and testing methodology. In contrast to previous methods, training
procedure is divided in two sub-tasks, 1. closed-set classification and, 2.
open-set identification (i.e. identifying a class as known or unknown). Encoder
learns the first task following the closed-set classification training
pipeline, whereas decoder learns the second task by reconstructing conditioned
on class identity. Furthermore, we model reconstruction errors using the
Extreme Value Theory of statistical modeling to find the threshold for
identifying known/unknown class samples. Experiments performed on multiple
image classification datasets show proposed method performs significantly
better than state of the art.Comment: CVPR2019 (Oral