Learning Calibrated Uncertainties for Domain Shift: A Distributionally Robust Learning Approach

Learning Calibrated Uncertainties for Domain Shift: A Distributionally Robust Learning Approach

Haoxuan Wang, Zhiding Yu, Yisong Yue, Animashree Anandkumar, Anqi Liu, Junchi Yan

Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 1460-1469. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2023/162

We propose a framework for learning calibrated uncertainties under domain shifts, considering the case where the source (training) distribution differs from the target (test) distribution. We detect such domain shifts through the use of a differentiable density ratio estimator and train it together with the task network, composing an adjusted softmax predictive form that concerns the domain shift. In particular, the density ratio estimator yields a density ratio that reflects the closeness of a target (test) sample to the source (training) distribution. We employ it to adjust the uncertainty of prediction in the task network. This idea of using the density ratio is based on the distributionally robust learning (DRL) framework, which accounts for the domain shift through adversarial risk minimization. We demonstrate that our proposed method generates calibrated uncertainties that benefit many downstream tasks, such as unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) and semi-supervised learning (SSL). On these tasks, methods like self-training and FixMatch use uncertainties to select confident pseudo-labels for re-training. Our experiments show that the introduction of DRL leads to significant improvements in cross-domain performance. We also demonstrate that the estimated density ratios show an agreement with the human selection frequencies, suggesting a positive correlation with a proxy of human perceived uncertainties.
Keywords:
Computer Vision: CV: Machine learning for vision
Machine Learning: ML: Classification
Machine Learning: ML: Multi-task and transfer learning