Learn to Accumulate Evidence from All Training Samples: Theory and Practice
Evidential deep learning, built upon belief theory and subjective logic, offers a principled and computationally efficient way to turn a deterministic neural network uncertainty-aware. The resultant evidential models can quantify fine-grained uncertainty using the learned evidence. To ensure theoretically sound evidential models, the evidence needs to be non-negative, which requires special activation functions for model training and inference. This constraint often leads to inferior predictive performance compared to standard softmax models, making it challenging to extend them to many large-scale datasets. To unveil the real cause of this undesired behavior, we theoretically investigate evidential models and identify a fundamental limitation that explains the inferior performance: existing evidential activation functions create zero evidence regions, which prevent the model to learn from training samples falling into such regions. A deeper analysis of evidential activation functions based on our theoretical underpinning inspires the design of a novel regularizer that effectively alleviates this fundamental limitation. Extensive experiments over many challenging real-world datasets and settings confirm our theoretical findings and demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.
Code (1)
Tasks
AllMethods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Beyond Local Surprise: Grounded Dialogue as Selective Belief Revision under Referential Uncertainty
When a speaker refers to a scene that the listener cannot directly see, the listener must decide whether to preserve its current understanding or revise it as new utterances arrive. Many language systems treat local mism…
Combination of Evidence Using the Principle of Minimum Information Gain
One of the most important aspects in any treatment of uncertain information is the rule of combination for updating the degrees of uncertainty. The theory of belief functions uses the Dempster rule to combine two belief …
Training Debiased Subnetworks with Contrastive Weight Pruning
Neural networks are often biased to spuriously correlated features that provide misleading statistical evidence that does not generalize. This raises an interesting question: ``Does an optimal unbiased functional subnetw…
Facial Attribute ClassificationQuantifying Error Propagation and Model Collapse in Diffusion Models
Machine learning models are increasingly trained or fine-tuned on synthetic data. Recursively training on such data has been observed to significantly degrade performance in a wide range of tasks, often characterized by …
When Should an AI Workflow Release? Always-Valid Inference for Black-Box Generate-Verify Systems
LLM-enabled AI workflows increasingly produce outputs through iterative generate-evaluate-revise loops. Each iteration can improve the candidate, but it also creates a release decision: when to stop and output the curren…