为DETR检测结果提供可信度评估,区分可靠与不可靠预测。
Uncertainty Quantification in Detection Transformers: Object-Level Calibration and Image-Level Reliability
- 发现DETR每张图仅一个预测可信,其余被刻意抑制置信度。
- 提出物体级校准误差(OCE),可同时评估模型与筛选可靠预测。
- 适合自动驾驶等高安全场景,帮助识别可信检测结果。
DETR及其变体作为端到端目标检测的前沿架构,虽能生成数百个预测,远超图像中真实物体数量,但其可靠性差异显著。我们通过实证与理论分析发现,同一图像内预测存在不同角色:每个物体仅一个预测被训练为校准良好,其余预测则被压制至近零前景置信度,即使定位准确。该策略是匈牙利匹配下损失最小化的自然结果。然而,推理时无法识别哪些预测可信,导致后处理算法可能输出混合校准水平的结果。现有指标如平均精度和期望校准误差均不适用。为此,我们提出物体级校准误差(OCE),其设计惩罚保留被压制预测和遗漏真实前景,适用于模型评估与可靠预测子集识别。最后,提出一种后验不确定性量化框架,可预测每张图像的模型准确性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
DETR and its variants have emerged as promising architectures for object detection, offering an end-to-end prediction pipeline. In practice, however, DETRs generate hundreds of predictions that far outnumber the actual objects present in an image. This raises a critical question: which of these predictions could be trusted? This is particularly important for safety-critical applications, such as in autonomous vehicles. Addressing this concern, we provide empirical and theoretical evidence that predictions within the same image play distinct roles, resulting in varying reliability levels. Our analysis reveals that DETRs employ an optimal specialist strategy: one prediction per object is trained to be well-calibrated, while the remaining predictions are trained to suppress their foreground confidence to near zero, even when maintaining accurate localization. We show that this strategy emerges as the loss-minimizing solution to the Hungarian matching, fundamentally shaping DETRs' outputs. While selecting the well-calibrated predictions is ideal, they are unidentifiable at inference time. This means that any post-processing algorithm poses a risk of outputting a set of predictions with mixed calibration levels. Therefore, practical deployment necessitates a joint evaluation of both the model's calibration quality and the effectiveness of the post-processing algorithm. However, we demonstrate that existing metrics like average precision and expected calibration error are inadequate for this task. To address this issue, we further introduce Object-level Calibration Error (OCE): This object-centric design penalizes both retaining suppressed predictions and missed ground truth foreground objects, making OCE suitable for both evaluating models and identifying reliable prediction subsets. Finally, we present a post hoc uncertainty quantification framework that predicts per-image model accuracy.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。