No Arabic abstract
Nested networks or slimmable networks are neural networks whose architectures can be adjusted instantly during testing time, e.g., based on computational constraints. Recent studies have focused on a nested dropout layer, which is able to order the nodes of a layer by importance during training, thus generating a nested set of sub-networks that are optimal for different configurations of resources. However, the dropout rate is fixed as a hyper-parameter over different layers during the whole training process. Therefore, when nodes are removed, the performance decays in a human-specified trajectory rather than in a trajectory learned from data. Another drawback is the generated sub-networks are deterministic networks without well-calibrated uncertainty. To address these two problems, we develop a Bayesian approach to nested neural networks. We propose a variational ordering unit that draws samples for nested dropout at a low cost, from a proposed Downhill distribution, which provides useful gradients to the parameters of nested dropout. Based on this approach, we design a Bayesian nested neural network that learns the order knowledge of the node distributions. In experiments, we show that the proposed approach outperforms the nested network in terms of accuracy, calibration, and out-of-domain detection in classification tasks. It also outperforms the related approach on uncertainty-critical tasks in computer vision.
Bayesian decision theory provides an elegant framework for acting optimally under uncertainty when tractable posterior distributions are available. Modern Bayesian models, however, typically involve intractable posteriors that are approximated with, potentially crude, surrogates. This difficulty has engendered loss-calibrated techniques that aim to learn posterior approximations that favor high-utility decisions. In this paper, focusing on Bayesian neural networks, we develop methods for correcting approximate posterior predictive distributions encouraging them to prefer high-utility decisions. In contrast to previous work, our approach is agnostic to the choice of the approximate inference algorithm, allows for efficient test time decision making through amortization, and empirically produces higher quality decisions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through controlled experiments spanning a diversity of tasks and datasets.
Calibrating neural networks is of utmost importance when employing them in safety-critical applications where the downstream decision making depends on the predicted probabilities. Measuring calibration error amounts to comparing two empirical distributions. In this work, we introduce a binning-free calibration measure inspired by the classical Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) statistical test in which the main idea is to compare the respective cumulative probability distributions. From this, by approximating the empirical cumulative distribution using a differentiable function via splines, we obtain a recalibration function, which maps the network outputs to actual (calibrated) class assignment probabilities. The spine-fitting is performed using a held-out calibration set and the obtained recalibration function is evaluated on an unseen test set. We tested our method against existing calibration approaches on various image classification datasets and our spline-based recalibration approach consistently outperforms existing methods on KS error as well as other commonly used calibration measures.
Calibration of neural networks is a critical aspect to consider when incorporating machine learning models in real-world decision-making systems where the confidence of decisions are equally important as the decisions themselves. In recent years, there is a surge of research on neural network calibration and the majority of the works can be categorized into post-hoc calibration methods, defined as methods that learn an additional function to calibrate an already trained base network. In this work, we intend to understand the post-hoc calibration methods from a theoretical point of view. Especially, it is known that minimizing Negative Log-Likelihood (NLL) will lead to a calibrated network on the training set if the global optimum is attained (Bishop, 1994). Nevertheless, it is not clear learning an additional function in a post-hoc manner would lead to calibration in the theoretical sense. To this end, we prove that even though the base network ($f$) does not lead to the global optimum of NLL, by adding additional layers ($g$) and minimizing NLL by optimizing the parameters of $g$ one can obtain a calibrated network $g circ f$. This not only provides a less stringent condition to obtain a calibrated network but also provides a theoretical justification of post-hoc calibration methods. Our experiments on various image classification benchmarks confirm the theory.
Existing uncertainty modeling approaches try to detect an out-of-distribution point from the in-distribution dataset. We extend this argument to detect finer-grained uncertainty that distinguishes between (a). certain points, (b). uncertain points but within the data distribution, and (c). out-of-distribution points. Our method corrects overconfident NN decisions, detects outlier points and learns to say ``I dont know when uncertain about a critical point between the top two predictions. In addition, we provide a mechanism to quantify class distributions overlap in the decision manifold and investigate its implications in model interpretability. Our method is two-step: in the first step, the proposed method builds a class distribution using Kernel Activation Vectors (kav) extracted from the Network. In the second step, the algorithm determines the confidence of a test point by a hierarchical decision rule based on the chi-squared distribution of squared Mahalanobis distances. Our method sits on top of a given Neural Network, requires a single scan of training data to estimate class distribution statistics, and is highly scalable to deep networks and wider pre-softmax layer. As a positive side effect, our method helps to prevent adversarial attacks without requiring any additional training. It is directly achieved when the Softmax layer is substituted by our robust uncertainty layer at the evaluation phase.
Accurate estimation of predictive uncertainty (model calibration) is essential for the safe application of neural networks. Many instances of miscalibration in modern neural networks have been reported, suggesting a trend that newer, more accurate models produce poorly calibrated predictions. Here, we revisit this question for recent state-of-the-art image classification models. We systematically relate model calibration and accuracy, and find that the most recent models, notably those not using convolutions, are among the best calibrated. Trends observed in prior model generations, such as decay of calibration with distribution shift or model size, are less pronounced in recent architectures. We also show that model size and amount of pretraining do not fully explain these differences, suggesting that architecture is a major determinant of calibration properties.