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 uncertainty estimation


Dirichlet-Based Monte Carlo Dropout for Uncertainty Estimation in Neural Networks

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Traditional neural networks provide deterministic predictions without inherent uncertainty estimates. While Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) offer a principled approach to uncertainty quantification, their computational complexity limits scalability. Monte Carlo (MC) Dropout, initially introduced as a regularization technique, has been shown to approximate Bayesian inference by enabling probabilistic modeling through multiple stochastic forward passes. In this work, we enhance uncertainty estimation in deep learning by integrating a Dirichlet-based framework within MC Dropout. Specifically, we leverage the formulation proposed by Sensoy et al. (2018), where class probabilities are modeled using a Dirichlet distribution, allowing for a more informative uncertainty representation. The proposed approach maintains the computational efficiency of MC Dropout while improving the quality of uncertainty estimates. We discuss the theoretical foundations of our method and compare it with existing uncertainty quantification techniques. The results highlight the effectiveness of the proposed method in producing well-calibrated uncertainty estimates, offering a practical solution for uncertainty-aware deep learning models.


Uncertainty Estimation for Safety-critical Scene Segmentation via Fine-grained Reward Maximization

Neural Information Processing Systems

Uncertainty estimation plays an important role for future reliable deployment of deep segmentation models in safety-critical scenarios such as medical applications. However, existing methods for uncertainty estimation have been limited by the lack of explicit guidance for calibrating the prediction risk and model confidence. In this work, we propose a novel fine-grained reward maximization (FGRM) framework, to address uncertainty estimation by directly utilizing an uncertainty metric related reward function with a reinforcement learning based model tuning algorithm. This would benefit the model uncertainty estimation through direct optimization guidance for model calibration. Specifically, our method designs a new uncertainty estimation reward function using the calibration metric, which is maximized to fine-tune an evidential learning pre-trained segmentation model for calibrating prediction risk.




Trustworthy Multimodal Regression with Mixture of Normal-inverse Gamma Distributions

Neural Information Processing Systems

Multimodal regression is a fundamental task, which integrates the information from different sources to improve the performance of follow-up applications. However, existing methods mainly focus on improving the performance and often ignore the confidence of prediction for diverse situations. In this study, we are devoted to trustworthy multimodal regression which is critical in cost-sensitive domains. To this end, we introduce a novel Mixture of Normal-Inverse Gamma distributions (MoNIG) algorithm, which efficiently estimates uncertainty in principle for adaptive integration of different modalities and produces a trustworthy regression result. Our model can be dynamically aware of uncertainty for each modality, and also robust for corrupted modalities. Furthermore, the proposed MoNIG ensures explicitly representation of (modality-specific/global) epistemic and aleatoric uncertainties, respectively. Experimental results on both synthetic and different real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness and trustworthiness of our method on various multimodal regression tasks (e.g., temperature prediction for superconductivity, relative location prediction for CT slices, and multimodal sentiment analysis3).


Conformal Time-Series Forecasting

Neural Information Processing Systems

Current approaches for (multi-horizon) time-series forecasting using recurrent neural networks (RNNs) focus on issuing point estimates, which are insufficient for informing decision-making in critical application domains wherein uncertainty estimates are also required. Existing methods for uncertainty quantification in RNNbased time-series forecasts are limited as they may require significant alterations to the underlying architecture, may be computationally complex, may be difficult to calibrate, may incur high sample complexity, and may not provide theoretical validity guarantees for the issued uncertainty intervals. In this work, we extend the inductive conformal prediction framework to the time-series forecasting setup, and propose a lightweight uncertainty estimation procedure to address the above limitations. With minimal exchangeability assumptions, our approach provides uncertainty intervals with theoretical guarantees on frequentist coverage for any multi-horizon forecast predictor and any dataset. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the conformal forecasting framework by comparing it with existing baselines on a variety of synthetic and real-world datasets.


Uncertainty Estimation for Multi-view Data: The Power of Seeing the Whole Picture Appendix AProofs and Derivations

Neural Information Processing Systems

The KL term in Equation (8) has an analytical expression because both q(uv)and p(uv)are Gaussian distributions. However, the log likelihood term is not analytical yet. In this section, we provide detailed experimental settings and additional experimental results for the synthetic dataset experiment in Appendix B.1, the robustness to noise experiment in Appendix B.2, and OOD samples detection experiment in Appendix B.3. B.1 Synthetic Dataset Experiment Dataset The original moon dataset in Scikit-learn1 has two sets of 2D data points: upper unit circle points (class 1) and lower unit circle points (class 2). We modified the original code by changing the radius of circle with three radius values (view 1: 1.7, view 2: 1.0, and view 3: 0.3) with a fixed random state.


Uncertainty Estimation for Multi-view Data: The Power of Seeing the Whole Picture

Neural Information Processing Systems

Uncertainty estimation is essential to make neural networks trustworthy in realworld applications. Extensive research efforts have been made to quantify and reduce predictive uncertainty. However, most existing works are designed for unimodal data, whereas multi-view uncertainty estimation has not been sufficiently investigated. Therefore, we propose a new multi-view classification framework for better uncertainty estimation and out-of-domain sample detection, where we associate each view with an uncertainty-aware classifier and combine the predictions of all the views in a principled way.