Since state-of-the-art uncertainty estimation methods are often computationally demanding, we investigate whether incorporating prior information can improve uncertainty estimates in conventional deep neural networks. Our focus is on machine learning tasks where meaningful predictions can be made from sub-parts of the input. For example, in speaker classification, the speech waveform can be divided into sequential patches, each containing information about the same speaker. We observe that the variance between sub-predictions serves as a reliable proxy for uncertainty in such settings. Our proposed variance-based scaling framework produces competitive uncertainty estimates in classification while being less computationally demanding and allowing for integration as a post-hoc calibration tool. This approach also leads to a simple extension of deep ensembles, improving the expressiveness of their predicted distributions.

Model Interpretation aims at the extraction of insights from the internals of a trained model. A common approach to address this task is the characterization of relevant features internally encoded in the model that are critical for its proper operation. Despite recent progress of these methods, they come with the weakness of being computationally expensive due to the dense evaluation of datasets that they require. As a consequence, research on the design of these methods have focused on smaller data subsets which may led to reduced insights. To address these computational costs, we propose a coreset-based interpretation framework that utilizes coreset selection methods to sample a representative subset of the large dataset for the interpretation task. Towards this goal, we propose a similarity-based evaluation protocol to assess the robustness of model interpretation methods towards the amount data they take as input. Experiments considering several interpretation methods, DNN models, and coreset selection methods show the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Capsule Networks (CapsNets) have been re-introduced as a more compact and interpretable alternative to standard deep neural networks. While recent efforts have proved their compression capabilities, to date, their interpretability properties have not been fully assessed. Here, we conduct a systematic and principled study towards assessing the interpretability of these types of networks. Moreover, we pay special attention towards analyzing the level to which part-whole relationships are indeed encoded within the learned representation. Our analysis in the MNIST, SVHN, PASCAL-part and CelebA datasets suggest that the representations encoded in CapsNets might not be as disentangled nor strictly related to parts-whole relationships as is commonly stated in the literature.