Accurate quantification of both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties is essential when deploying Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in high-stakes applications such as drug discovery and financial fraud detection, where reliable predictions are critical. Although Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) efficiently quantifies uncertainty using a Dirichlet distribution over predictive probabilities, existing EDL-based GNN (EGNN) models require modifications to the network architecture and retraining, failing to take advantage of pre-trained models. We propose a plug-and-play framework for uncertainty quantification in GNNs that works with pre-trained models without the need for retraining. Our Evidential Probing Network (EPN) uses a lightweight Multi-Layer-Perceptron (MLP) head to extract evidence from learned representations, allowing efficient integration with various GNN architectures. We further introduce evidence-based regularization techniques, referred to as EPN-reg, to enhance the estimation of epistemic uncertainty with theoretical justifications. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed EPN-reg achieves state-of-the-art performance in accurate and efficient uncertainty quantification, making it suitable for real-world deployment.
Evidential Deep Learning: Enhancing Predictive Uncertainty Estimation for Earth System Science Applications
National Center for Atmospheric Research（国家大气研究中心）；Cooperative Institute for Severe and High-Impact Weather Research and Operations（恶劣与高影响天气研究与合作研究所）；National Severe Storms Laboratory（国家强风暴实验室）；University Corporation for Atmospheric Research（大学大气研究公司）；University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；University at Albany, State University of New York（纽约州立大学奥尔巴尼分校）；Colorado State University（科罗拉多州立大学）；The Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）
EvidentialRAG: Quantifying and Mitigating Information Conflict in Multi-Source Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Evidential Deep Learning
School of Computing, Wichita State University（威奇托州立大学计算学院）；Department of Computer Science, American International University-Bangladesh（美国国际孟加拉大学计算机科学系）
UASPL: Uncertainty-Aware Self-Paced Learning with Evidential Neural Networks
College of Information Engineering, Northwest A&F University（西北农林科技大学信息工程学院）；Northwest A&F University（西北农林科技大学）；Northwest A&F University ShenZhen Research Institute（西北农林科技大学深圳研究院）
Evidential time-to-event prediction with calibrated uncertainty quantification
Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学苏瑞福公共卫生学院）；Institute of Data Science, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学数据科学研究所）；Université de Technologie de Compiègne, CNRS, Heudiasyc（贡比涅技术大学、法国国家科研中心、Heudiasyc实验室）；Institut universitaire de France（法国大学研究院）
University of Texas at Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校）；NEC Laboratories America（NEC美国实验室）
Sound Event Early Detection (SEED) is an essential task in recognizing the acoustic environments and soundscapes. However, most of the existing methods focus on the offline sound event detection, which suffers from the over-confidence issue of early-stage event detection and usually yield unreliable results. To solve the problem, we propose a novel Polyphonic Evidential Neural Network (PENet) to model the evidential uncertainty of the class probability with Beta distribution. Specifically, we use a Beta distribution to model the distribution of class probabilities, and the evidential uncertain…
Detecting Misbehaviors of Large Vision-Language Models by Evidential Uncertainty Quantification
State Key Laboratory of Advanced Rail Autonomous Operation（先进轨道交通自主运行国家重点实验室）；Beijing Key Laboratory of Traffic Data Mining and Embodied Intelligence（北京交通数据挖掘与具身智能重点实验室）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Automation and Intelligence, Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学自动化与智能学院）；Beijing Key Laboratory of Security and Privacy in Intelligent Transportation（北京智能交通安全与隐私重点实验室）
Heidelberg University（海德堡大学）；Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence（博世人工智能中心）
We propose a novel method for closed-form predictive distribution modeling with neural nets. In quantifying prediction uncertainty, we build on Evidential Deep Learning, which has been impactful as being both simple to implement and giving closed-form access to predictive uncertainty. We employ it to model aleatoric uncertainty and extend it to account also for epistemic uncertainty by converting it to a Bayesian Neural Net. While extending its uncertainty quantification capabilities, we maintain its analytically accessible predictive distribution model by performing progressive moment matchin…
The Conditional Neural Process (CNP) family of models offer a promising direction to tackle few-shot problems by achieving better scalability and competitive predictive performance. However, the current CNP models only capture the overall uncertainty for the prediction made on a target data point. They lack a systematic fine-grained quantification on the distinct sources of uncertainty that are essential for model training and decision-making under the few-shot setting. We propose Evidential Conditional Neural Processes (ECNP), which replace the standard Gaussian distribution used by CNP with …
EviDep: Uncertainty-Aware Multimodal Depression Estimation via Disentangled Evidential Learning
School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学计算机科学与信息工程学院）；Department of Psychiatry, The First Affiliated Hospital of University of Science and Technology of China, Division of Life Sciences and Medicine, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学附属第一医院精神科，生命科学与医学学院）
Toward Efficient Uncertainty in LLMs through Evidential Knowledge Distillation
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad（计算机科学与工程系，印度理工学院海得拉巴分校）；Jagiellonian University, Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science（雅盖隆大学，数学与计算机科学学院）
In this paper, we propose TEDL, a two-stage learning approach to quantify uncertainty for deep learning models in classification tasks, inspired by our findings in experimenting with Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) method, a recently proposed uncertainty quantification approach based on the Dempster-Shafer theory. More specifically, we observe that EDL tends to yield inferior AUC compared with models learnt by cross-entropy loss and is highly sensitive in training. Such sensitivity is likely to cause unreliable uncertainty estimation, making it risky for practical applications. To mitigate both…
In this contribution, we predict the wellhead protection area (WHPA, target), the shape and extent of which is influenced by the distribution of hydraulic conductivity (K), from a small number of tracing experiments (predictor). Our first objective is to make stochastic predictions of the WHPA within the Bayesian Evidential Learning (BEL) framework, which aims to find a direct relationship between predictor and target using machine learning. This relationship is learned from a small set of training models (400) sampled from the prior distribution of K. The associated 400 pairs of simulated pre…
Université de technologie de Compiègne（贡比涅技术大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Institut universitaire de France（法国大学研究院）
We introduce a distance-based neural network model for regression, in which prediction uncertainty is quantified by a belief function on the real line. The model interprets the distances of the input vector to prototypes as pieces of evidence represented by Gaussian random fuzzy numbers (GRFN's) and combined by the generalized product intersection rule, an operator that extends Dempster's rule to random fuzzy sets. The network output is a GRFN that can be summarized by three numbers characterizing the most plausible predicted value, variability around this value, and epistemic uncertainty. Exp…
Equivariant Evidential Deep Learning for Interatomic Potentials
Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Fudan University（复旦大学计算机科学与人工智能学院）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）
Variational Inference for Evidential Deep Learning
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University（东南大学计算机科学与工程学院）；School of Computing Information Sciences, Saint Francis University（圣弗朗西斯大学计算信息科学学院）；Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学计算机科学系）；Key Laboratory of New Generation Artificial Intelligence Technology and Its Interdisciplinary Applications (Southeast University), Ministry of Education, China（新一代人工智能技术及其交叉应用关键实验室（东南大学），中华人民共和国教育部，中国）
UT Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校）；US Army Research Lab（美国陆军研究实验室）；Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工学院暨州立大学）
Traditional deep neural nets (NNs) have shown the state-of-the-art performance in the task of classification in various applications. However, NNs have not considered any types of uncertainty associated with the class probabilities to minimize risk due to misclassification under uncertainty in real life. Unlike Bayesian neural nets indirectly infering uncertainty through weight uncertainties, evidential neural networks (ENNs) have been recently proposed to support explicit modeling of the uncertainty of class probabilities. It treats predictions of an NN as subjective opinions and learns the f…
The University of Texas at Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校）；Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工大学）
Traditional deep neural networks (NNs) have significantly contributed to the state-of-the-art performance in the task of classification under various application domains. However, NNs have not considered inherent uncertainty in data associated with the class probabilities where misclassification under uncertainty may easily introduce high risk in decision making in real-world contexts (e.g., misclassification of objects in roads leads to serious accidents). Unlike Bayesian NN that indirectly infer uncertainty through weight uncertainties, evidential NNs (ENNs) have been recently proposed to ex…
Deterministic neural networks (NNs) are increasingly being deployed in safety critical domains, where calibrated, robust, and efficient measures of uncertainty are crucial. In this paper, we propose a novel method for training non-Bayesian NNs to estimate a continuous target as well as its associated evidence in order to learn both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty. We accomplish this by placing evidential priors over the original Gaussian likelihood function and training the NN to infer the hyperparameters of the evidential distribution. We additionally impose priors during training such th…
IT University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根信息技术大学）；Technical University of Denmark（丹麦技术大学）；Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence（先锋人工智能中心）
Popular approaches for quantifying predictive uncertainty in deep neural networks often involve distributions over weights or multiple models, for instance via Markov Chain sampling, ensembling, or Monte Carlo dropout. These techniques usually incur overhead by having to train multiple model instances or do not produce very diverse predictions. This comprehensive and extensive survey aims to familiarize the reader with an alternative class of models based on the concept of Evidential Deep Learning: For unfamiliar data, they aim to admit "what they don't know", and fall back onto a prior belief…
Ozyegin University（奥兹耶金大学）；US Army Research Lab（美国陆军研究实验室）；Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence（博世人工智能中心）
Deterministic neural nets have been shown to learn effective predictors on a wide range of machine learning problems. However, as the standard approach is to train the network to minimize a prediction loss, the resultant model remains ignorant to its prediction confidence. Orthogonally to Bayesian neural nets that indirectly infer prediction uncertainty through weight uncertainties, we propose explicit modeling of the same using the theory of subjective logic. By placing a Dirichlet distribution on the class probabilities, we treat predictions of a neural net as subjective opinions and learn t…
A Comprehensive Survey on Evidential Deep Learning and Its Applications
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
Uncertainty-Supervised Interpretable and Robust Evidential Segmentation
School of Data Science, Fudan University, Shanghai, China（复旦大学数据科学学院）；Institute of Science and Technology for Brain-inspired intelligence, Fudan University, Shanghai, China（复旦大学脑启发式智能技术研究所）；Nuffield Department of Population Health, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK（牛津大学人口健康牛津部门）
Evidential Deep Active Learning for Semi-Supervised Classification
College of Information Engineering, Northwest A&F University（信息工程学院，西北农林科技大学）；Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学）；Department of Communications Sciences, University of Teramo（通讯科学系，乌尔巴诺-特拉莫大学）
German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心）；Institute for Simulation Intelligence（模拟智能研究所）
There is significant need for principled uncertainty reasoning in machine learning systems as they are increasingly deployed in safety-critical domains. A new approach with uncertainty-aware neural networks (NNs), based on learning evidential distributions for aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties, shows promise over traditional deterministic methods and typical Bayesian NNs, yet several important gaps in the theory and implementation of these networks remain. We discuss three issues with a proposed solution to extract aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties from regression-based neural networks…
University of Southern Denmark（南丹麦大学）；Istanbul Technical University（伊斯坦布尔技术大学）；Heidelberg University（海德堡大学）；Aalto University（阿尔托大学）
A probabilistic classifier with reliable predictive uncertainties i) fits successfully to the target domain data, ii) provides calibrated class probabilities in difficult regions of the target domain (e.g.\ class overlap), and iii) accurately identifies queries coming out of the target domain and rejects them. We introduce an original combination of Evidential Deep Learning, Neural Processes, and Neural Turing Machines capable of providing all three essential properties mentioned above for total uncertainty quantification. We observe our method on five classification tasks to be the only one t…
Uncertainty Quantification of Wind Gust Predictions in the Northeast United States: An Evidential Neural Network and Explainable Artificial Intelligence Approach
University of Connecticut（康涅狄格大学）；NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research（NSF国家大气研究中心）
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；TECNALIA（TECNALIA（西班牙技术中心））；University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)（巴斯克大学）；Royal Brompton Hospital（皇家布朗普顿医院）
Despite recent advances in the accuracy of brain tumor segmentation, the results still suffer from low reliability and robustness. Uncertainty estimation is an efficient solution to this problem, as it provides a measure of confidence in the segmentation results. The current uncertainty estimation methods based on quantile regression, Bayesian neural network, ensemble, and Monte Carlo dropout are limited by their high computational cost and inconsistency. In order to overcome these challenges, Evidential Deep Learning (EDL) was developed in recent work but primarily for natural image classific…
