GEODE: Angle-Adaptive OOD Detection with Universal Scorer Compatibility
Outlier Exposure (OE) is among the strongest training-based OOD detectors on standard benchmarks but exhibits scorer-dependent tradeoffs (e.g., strong on MSP, weak on KNN) and requires curated auxiliary data. We show why OE works: its features sit at the same geometric locus as real near-OOD data, with the boundary-adjacent quartile driving nearly all of OE's gain. OE is boundary calibration, not OOD coverage. GEODE (GEOmetry-preserving DEtection) replicates this calibration synthetically through an angle-adaptive norm loss in which targets scale per-sample with cosine similarity to the nearest class mean, preserving feature geometry where boundary structure matters. Four theorems grounded in neural collapse justify the design. GEODE works across all seven standard scorers on CIFAR-10 (near-OOD AUROC 89.0-92.3, far-OOD reaching 93.05; no catastrophic failure on any scorer). Since the OOD regime is unknown at deployment, this is the test that matters. GEODE outperforms vanilla CE at matched epoch counts. Combined with OE, GEODE reaches 95.0 MSP / 94.8 KNN on CIFAR-10 and beats OE on every scorer on CIFAR-100. The gains hold on WRN-28-10 (+4.5 Energy, 3 seeds). Unlike methods that push OOD into the classifier null space (e.g., PFS, 14.38 KNN AUROC, worse than random), GEODE's adaptive target preserves the geometry that distance-based scorers depend on.