Liu

Open category detection is the problem of detecting "alien" test instances that belong to categories/classes that were not present in the training data. In many applications, reliably detecting such aliens is central to ensuring safety and/or quality of test data analysis. Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, there are no algorithms that provide theoretical guarantees on their ability to detect aliens under general assumptions. Further, while there are algorithms for open category detection, there are few empirical results that directly report alien-detection rates. Thus, there are significant theoretical and empirical gaps in our understanding of open category detection.