A fundamental question in adversarial machine learning is whether a robust classifier exists for a given task. A line of research has made some progress towards this goal by studying the concentration of measure, but we argue standard concentration fails to fully characterize the intrinsic robustness of a classification problem since it ignores data labels which are essential to any classification task. Building on a novel definition of label uncertainty, we empirically demonstrate that error regions induced by state-of-the-art models tend to have much higher label uncertainty than randomly-selected subsets. This observation motivates us to adapt a concentration estimation algorithm to account for label uncertainty, resulting in more accurate intrinsic robustness measures for benchmark image classification problems.
Amazon Search（亚马逊搜索）；University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）
Uncertainty quantification is one of the most crucial tasks to obtain trustworthy and reliable machine learning models for decision making. However, most research in this domain has only focused on problems with small label spaces and ignored eXtreme Multi-label Classification (XMC), which is an essential task in the era of big data for web-scale machine learning applications. Moreover, enormous label spaces could also lead to noisy retrieval results and intractable computational challenges for uncertainty quantification. In this paper, we aim to investigate general uncertainty quantification …
Humans exhibit disagreement during data labeling. We term this disagreement as human label uncertainty. In this work, we study the ramifications of human label uncertainty (HLU). Our evaluation of existing uncertainty estimation algorithms, with the presence of HLU, indicates the limitations of existing uncertainty metrics and algorithms themselves in response to HLU. Meanwhile, we observe undue effects in predictive uncertainty and generalizability. To mitigate the undue effects, we introduce a novel natural scene statistics (NSS) based label dilution training scheme without requiring massive…
Perceptual Quality-based Model Training under Annotator Label Uncertainty
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Center for Energy and Geo Processing (CeGP)（能源与地球处理中心）；School of Electrical and Computer Engineering（电气与计算机工程学院）
Corporate Research, Robert Bosch GmbH（罗伯特·博世公司企业研究部）；Institute of Measurement, Control and Microtechnology, Ulm University（乌尔姆大学测量、控制与微技术研究所）
Reliable uncertainty estimation is crucial for robust object detection in autonomous driving. However, previous works on probabilistic object detection either learn predictive probability for bounding box regression in an un-supervised manner, or use simple heuristics to do uncertainty regularization. This leads to unstable training or suboptimal detection performance. In this work, we leverage our previously proposed method for estimating uncertainty inherent in ground truth bounding box parameters (which we call label uncertainty) to improve the detection accuracy of a probabilistic LiDAR-ba…
Probabilistic Label Spreading: Efficient and Consistent Estimation of Soft Labels with Epistemic Uncertainty on Graphs
Institute of Computer Science Osnabrück University（计算机科学研究所 奥斯纳布鲁克大学）；Department of Mathematics Technical University of Berlin（数学系 柏林技术大学）；Department of Mathematics University of Wuppertal（数学系 威斯巴赫大学）；Quality Match GmbH Heidelberg, Germany（Quality Match GmbH 海德堡德国）
Segmentation uncertainty models predict a distribution over plausible segmentations for a given input, which they learn from the annotator variation in the training set. However, in practice these annotations can differ systematically in the way they are generated, for example through the use of different labeling tools. This results in datasets that contain both data variability and differing label styles. In this paper, we demonstrate that applying state-of-the-art segmentation uncertainty models on such datasets can lead to model bias caused by the different label styles. We present an upda…
University of Massachusetts Boston（马萨诸塞大学波士顿分校）；University of Tennesee（田纳西大学）
The study of model bias and variance with respect to decision boundaries is critically important in supervised classification. There is generally a tradeoff between the two, as fine-tuning of the decision boundary of a classification model to accommodate more boundary training samples (i.e., higher model complexity) may improve training accuracy (i.e., lower bias) but hurt generalization against unseen data (i.e., higher variance). By focusing on just classification boundary fine-tuning and model complexity, it is difficult to reduce both bias and variance. To overcome this dilemma, we take a …
Center for Research in Computer Vision（计算机视觉研究中心）；University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）
The recent research in semi-supervised learning (SSL) is mostly dominated by consistency regularization based methods which achieve strong performance. However, they heavily rely on domain-specific data augmentations, which are not easy to generate for all data modalities. Pseudo-labeling (PL) is a general SSL approach that does not have this constraint but performs relatively poorly in its original formulation. We argue that PL underperforms due to the erroneous high confidence predictions from poorly calibrated models; these predictions generate many incorrect pseudo-labels, leading to noisy…
German Aerospace Center（德国航空航天中心）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；LMU Munich（慕尼黑大学）
Technological and computational advances continuously drive forward the broad field of deep learning. In recent years, the derivation of quantities describing theuncertainty in the prediction - which naturally accompanies the modeling process - has sparked general interest in the deep learning community. Often neglected in the machine learning setting is the human uncertainty that influences numerous labeling processes. As the core of this work, label uncertainty is explicitly embedded into the training process via distributional labels. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on imag…
Learning against label noise is a vital topic to guarantee a reliable performance for deep neural networks. Recent research usually refers to dynamic noise modeling with model output probabilities and loss values, and then separates clean and noisy samples. These methods have gained notable success. However, unlike cherry-picked data, existing approaches often cannot perform well when facing imbalanced datasets, a common scenario in the real world. We thoroughly investigate this phenomenon and point out two major issues that hinder the performance, i.e., \emph{inter-class loss distribution dis…
Deargen Inc.（Deargen公司）；Deargen USA Inc.（Deargen美国公司）
The standard empirical risk minimization (ERM) can underperform on certain minority groups (i.e., waterbirds in lands or landbirds in water) due to the spurious correlation between the input and its label. Several studies have improved the worst-group accuracy by focusing on the high-loss samples. The hypothesis behind this is that such high-loss samples are \textit{spurious-cue-free} (SCF) samples. However, these approaches can be problematic since the high-loss samples may also be samples with noisy labels in the real-world scenarios. To resolve this issue, we utilize the predictive uncertai…
Enhancing Uncertainty Quantification in Drug Discovery with Censored Regression Labels
AstraZeneca R&D（阿斯利康研发部）；ELLIS Unit Linz（林茨ELLIS单元）；Institute for Machine Learning（机器学习研究所）；Johannes Kepler University Linz（约翰内斯·开普勒大学林茨分校）；KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）；Chalmers University of Technology（查尔姆斯理工大学）
Incremental Uncertainty-aware Performance Monitoring with Active Labeling Intervention
Siemens AG（西门子公司）；Goethe University Frankfurt（法兰克福歌德大学）；LMU Munich（慕尼黑大学）；Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML)（慕尼黑机器学习中心）；German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ)（德国癌症研究中心）；German Cancer Consortium (DKTK)（德国癌症联盟）
Trustworthy deployment of ML models requires a proper measure of uncertainty, especially in safety-critical applications. We focus on uncertainty quantification (UQ) for classification problems via two avenues -- prediction sets using conformal prediction and calibration of probabilistic predictors by post-hoc binning -- since these possess distribution-free guarantees for i.i.d. data. Two common ways of generalizing beyond the i.i.d. setting include handling covariate and label shift. Within the context of distribution-free UQ, the former has already received attention, but not the latter. It…
Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence（博世人工智能中心）；BCAI（博世人工智能中心）；University of Ulm（乌尔姆大学）
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are powerful tools in computer vision tasks. However, in many realistic scenarios label noise is prevalent in the training images, and overfitting to these noisy labels can significantly harm the generalization performance of DNNs. We propose a novel technique to identify data with noisy labels based on the different distributions of the predictive uncertainties from a DNN over the clean and noisy data. Additionally, the behavior of the uncertainty over the course of training helps to identify the network weights which best can be used to relabel the noisy labels. D…
Benchmarking Uncertainty and its Disentanglement in multi-label Chest X-Ray Classification
Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz-Institut（弗劳恩霍夫海因里希-赫兹研究所）；Technische Universität Berlin（柏林技术大学）；The Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data (BIFOLD)（柏林学习与数据基础研究所）
Naver Shopping, NAVER Corp.（NAVER 公司 Naver Shopping）；Clova AI Research, NAVER Corp.（NAVER 公司 Clova AI 研究院）
Label noise is a critical factor that degrades the generalization performance of deep neural networks, thus leading to severe issues in real-world problems. Existing studies have employed strategies based on either loss or uncertainty to address noisy labels, and ironically some strategies contradict each other: emphasizing or discarding uncertain samples or concentrating on high or low loss samples. To elucidate how opposing strategies can enhance model performance and offer insights into training with noisy labels, we present analytical results on how loss and uncertainty values of samples c…
The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Hong Kong Baptist University（香港浸会大学）；The University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；RIKEN（理化学研究所）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）
In learning with noisy labels, the sample selection approach is very popular, which regards small-loss data as correctly labeled during training. However, losses are generated on-the-fly based on the model being trained with noisy labels, and thus large-loss data are likely but not certainly to be incorrect. There are actually two possibilities of a large-loss data point: (a) it is mislabeled, and then its loss decreases slower than other data, since deep neural networks "learn patterns first"; (b) it belongs to an underrepresented group of data and has not been selected yet. In this paper, we…
Multi-label learning draws great interests in many real world applications. It is a highly costly task to assign many labels by the oracle for one instance. Meanwhile, it is also hard to build a good model without diagnosing discriminative labels. Can we reduce the label costs and improve the ability to train a good model for multi-label learning simultaneously? Active learning addresses the less training samples problem by querying the most valuable samples to achieve a better performance with little costs. In multi-label active learning, some researches have been done for querying the releva…
University of California, Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校）；New York University（纽约大学）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
With the widespread success of deep neural networks in science and technology, it is becoming increasingly important to quantify the uncertainty of the predictions produced by deep learning. In this paper, we introduce a new method that attaches an explicit uncertainty statement to the probabilities of classification using deep neural networks. Precisely, we view that the classification probabilities are sampled from an unknown distribution, and we propose to learn this distribution through the Dirichlet mixture that is flexible enough for approximating any continuous distribution on the simpl…
Deep neural networks present impressive performance, yet they cannot reliably estimate their predictive confidence, limiting their applicability in high-risk domains. We show that applying a multi-label one-vs-all loss reveals classification ambiguity and reduces model overconfidence. The introduced SLOVA (Single Label One-Vs-All) model redefines typical one-vs-all predictive probabilities to a single label situation, where only one class is the correct answer. The proposed classifier is confident only if a single class has a high probability and other probabilities are negligible. Unlike the …
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）
In contrast to multi-label learning, label distribution learning characterizes the polysemy of examples by a label distribution to represent richer semantics. In the learning process of label distribution, the training data is collected mainly by manual annotation or label enhancement algorithms to generate label distribution. Unfortunately, the complexity of the manual annotation task or the inaccuracy of the label enhancement algorithm leads to noise and uncertainty in the label distribution training set. To alleviate this problem, we introduce the implicit distribution in the label distribu…
As different people perceive others' emotional expressions differently, their annotation in terms of arousal and valence are per se subjective. To address this, these emotion annotations are typically collected by multiple annotators and averaged across annotators in order to obtain labels for arousal and valence. However, besides the average, also the uncertainty of a label is of interest, and should also be modeled and predicted for automatic emotion recognition. In the literature, for simplicity, label uncertainty modeling is commonly approached with a Gaussian assumption on the collected a…
Recent success of large-scale pre-trained language models crucially hinge on fine-tuning them on large amounts of labeled data for the downstream task, that are typically expensive to acquire. In this work, we study self-training as one of the earliest semi-supervised learning approaches to reduce the annotation bottleneck by making use of large-scale unlabeled data for the target task. Standard self-training mechanism randomly samples instances from the unlabeled pool to pseudo-label and augment labeled data. In this work, we propose an approach to improve self-training by incorporating uncer…
We consider an agent's uncertainty about its environment and the problem of generalizing this uncertainty across observations. Specifically, we focus on the problem of exploration in non-tabular reinforcement learning. Drawing inspiration from the intrinsic motivation literature, we use density models to measure uncertainty, and propose a novel algorithm for deriving a pseudo-count from an arbitrary density model. This technique enables us to generalize count-based exploration algorithms to the non-tabular case. We apply our ideas to Atari 2600 games, providing sensible pseudo-counts from raw …
We introduce a framework for uncertainty estimation that both describes and extends many existing methods. We consider typical hyperparameters involved in classical training as random variables and marginalise them out to capture various sources of uncertainty in the parameter space. We investigate which forms and combinations of marginalisation are most useful from a practical point of view on standard benchmarking data sets. Moreover, we discuss how some marginalisations may produce reliable estimates of uncertainty without the need for extensive hyperparameter tuning and/or large-scale ense…
Learning with label proportions (LLP), which is a learning task that only provides unlabeled data in bags and each bag's label proportion, has widespread successful applications in practice. However, most of the existing LLP methods don't consider the knowledge transfer for uncertain data. This paper presents a transfer learning-based approach for the problem of learning with label proportions(TL-LLP) to transfer knowledge from source task to target task where both the source and target tasks contain uncertain data. Our approach first formulates objective model for the uncertain data and deals…
What target labels are most effective for graph neural network (GNN) training? In some applications where GNNs excel-like drug design or fraud detection, labeling new instances is expensive. We develop a data-efficient active sampling framework, ScatterSample, to train GNNs under an active learning setting. ScatterSample employs a sampling module termed DiverseUncertainty to collect instances with large uncertainty from different regions of the sample space for labeling. To ensure diversification of the selected nodes, DiverseUncertainty clusters the high uncertainty nodes and selects the repr…
Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence（博世人工智能中心）；University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）
Object type classification for automotive radar has greatly improved with recent deep learning (DL) solutions, however these developments have mostly focused on the classification accuracy. Before employing DL solutions in safety-critical applications, such as automated driving, an indispensable prerequisite is the accurate quantification of the classifiers' reliability. Unfortunately, DL classifiers are characterized as black-box systems which output severely over-confident predictions, leading downstream decision-making systems to false conclusions with possibly catastrophic consequences. We…
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）；Le Mans University（勒芒大学）
Pseudo-label (PL) filtering forms a crucial part of Self-Training (ST) methods for unsupervised domain adaptation. Dropout-based Uncertainty-driven Self-Training (DUST) proceeds by first training a teacher model on source domain labeled data. Then, the teacher model is used to provide PLs for the unlabeled target domain data. Finally, we train a student on augmented labeled and pseudo-labeled data. The process is iterative, where the student becomes the teacher for the next DUST iteration. A crucial step that precedes the student model training in each DUST iteration is filtering out noisy PLs…
Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院）；University of Kent（肯特大学）；University of Augsburg（奥格斯堡大学）
We focus on using the predictive uncertainty signal calculated by Bayesian neural networks to guide learning in the self-same task the model is being trained on. Not opting for costly Monte Carlo sampling of weights, we propagate the approximate hidden variance in an end-to-end manner, throughout a variational Bayesian adaptation of a ResNet with attention and squeeze-and-excitation blocks, in order to identify data samples that should contribute less into the loss value calculation. We, thus, propose uncertainty-aware, data-specific label smoothing, where the smoothing probability is dependen…
In some industrial applications such as fraud detection, the performance of common supervision techniques may be affected by the poor quality of the available labels : in actual operational use-cases, these labels may be weak in quantity, quality or trustworthiness. We propose a benchmark to evaluate the natural robustness of different algorithms taken from various paradigms on artificially corrupted datasets, with a focus on noisy labels. This paper studies the intrinsic robustness of some leading classifiers. The algorithms under scrutiny include SVM, logistic regression, random forests, XGB…
Conformal Prediction for Federated Uncertainty Quantification Under Label Shift
Ecole Polytechnique（巴黎综合理工学院）；Lagrange Mathematics and Computing Research Center（拉格朗日数学与计算研究中心）；Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology（斯科尔科沃科学技术研究院）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Technology Innovation Institute（技术创新研究院）
ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
Uncertainty estimation in deep learning has recently emerged as a crucial area of interest to advance reliability and robustness in safety-critical applications. While there have been many proposed methods that either focus on distance-aware model uncertainties for out-of-distribution detection or on input-dependent label uncertainties for in-distribution calibration, both of these types of uncertainty are often necessary. In this work, we propose the HetSNGP method for jointly modeling the model and data uncertainty. We show that our proposed model affords a favorable combination between thes…
Rep-GLS: Report-Guided Generalized Label Smoothing for Robust Disease Detection
Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health, Chinese Academy of Sciences（广州生物医学研究院，中国科学院）；Kunming Medical University（昆明医科大学）；Northumbria University（北umbria大学）；NII, Tokyo Institute of Technology（东京技术大学国家研究所）；RIKEN（理化学研究所）；Westlake University（西湖大学）
