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arXiv · 2606.16196

When Confidence Lacks Concepts: Interpretable OOD Detection via Representation Perturbations

Anju Chhetri·Pratik Shrestha·Ramesh Rana·Sam Philip·Prashnna Gyawali·Binod Bhattarai
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Abstract

Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable performance across medical imaging tasks, yet their tendency to overgeneralize under distributional shifts poses a major obstacle to safe clinical deployment. Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection methods aim to mitigate this risk, but most existing approaches rely on opaque internal signals with poorly understood semantic meaning, limiting trust in safety-critical settings. In this work, we propose an interpretable OOD detection framework that probes the stability of model predictions under class-conditioned semantic perturbations. Leveraging sparse autoencoders (SAEs), we learn class-specific concept vectors from in-distribution data that disentangle dense intermediate representations into sparse, semantically meaningful components. At inference, we perturb deeper-layer representations using the concept vectors associated with the model's predicted class and measure the class logits stability. We hypothesize that in-distribution samples exhibit low sensitivity to such perturbations, as their representations align with class-specific semantic directions, whereas OOD samples show amplified deviations due to representational misalignment. By framing OOD detection as a concept conditioned stability analysis, our approach provides both a discriminative OOD signal and an interpretable lens into the internal mechanisms driving model uncertainty, making it particularly suitable for high stakes medical applications.

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Anju Chhetri, Pratik Shrestha, Ramesh Rana, Sam Philip, Prashnna Gyawali, Binod Bhattarai. 2026-06-21. When Confidence Lacks Concepts: Interpretable OOD Detection via Representation Perturbations. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16196

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