How to Fix a Broken Confidence Estimator: Evaluating Post-hoc Methods for Selective Classification with Deep Neural Networks
This paper addresses the problem of selective classification for deep neural networks, where a model is allowed to abstain from low-confidence predictions to avoid potential errors. We focus on so-called post-hoc methods, which replace the confidence estimator of a given classifier without modifying or retraining it, thus being practically appealing. Considering neural networks with softmax outputs, our goal is to identify the best confidence estimator that can be computed directly from the unnormalized logits. This problem is motivated by the intriguing observation in recent work that many classifiers appear to have a "broken" confidence estimator, in the sense that their selective classification performance is much worse than what could be expected by their corresponding accuracies. We perform an extensive experimental study of many existing and proposed confidence estimators applied to 84 pretrained ImageNet classifiers available from popular repositories. Our results show that a simple $p$-norm normalization of the logits, followed by taking the maximum logit as the confidence estimator, can lead to considerable gains in selective classification performance, completely fixing the pathological behavior observed in many classifiers. As a consequence, the selective classification performance of any classifier becomes almost entirely determined by its corresponding accuracy. Moreover, these results are shown to be consistent under distribution shift. Our code is available at https://github.com/lfpc/FixSelectiveClassification.
Code (1)
Tasks
ClassificationMethods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Kernel Meets Sieve: Post-Regularization Confidence Bands for Sparse Additive Model
We develop a novel procedure for constructing confidence bands for components of a sparse additive model. Our procedure is based on a new kernel-sieve hybrid estimator that combines two most popular nonparametric estimat…
Additive modelsA Confidence-based Partial Label Learning Model for Crowd-Annotated Named Entity Recognition
Existing models for named entity recognition (NER) are mainly based on large-scale labeled datasets, which always obtain using crowdsourcing. However, it is hard to obtain a unified and correct label via majority voting …
named-entity-recognitionNamed Entity RecognitionNamed Entity Recognition (NER)NER+1Selective Prediction for Semantic Segmentation using Post-Hoc Confidence Estimation and Its Performance under Distribution Shift
Semantic segmentation plays a crucial role in various computer vision applications, yet its efficacy is often hindered by the lack of high-quality labeled data. To address this challenge, a common strategy is to leverage…
SegmentationSemantic SegmentationTrace Length is a Simple Uncertainty Signal in Reasoning Models
Uncertainty quantification for LLMs is a key research direction towards addressing hallucination and other issues that limit their reliable deployment. In this work, we show that reasoning trace length is a simple and us…
Quasi-Bayesian Estimation and Inference with Control Functions
This paper introduces a quasi-Bayesian method that integrates frequentist nonparametric estimation with Bayesian inference in a two-stage process. Applied to an endogenous discrete choice model, the approach first uses k…
Bayesian InferenceComputational EfficiencyDiscrete Choice Modelsvalid