arXiv:2602.20153stat.MLcs.LG2026-02

提出联合校准分类模型中两类不确定性的新方法,提升预测可信度。

JUCAL: Jointly Calibrating Aleatoric and Epistemic Uncertainty in Classification Tasks

  • 联合优化两个常数,同时校准标签噪声和模型不确定性。
  • 在文本分类任务上,使负对数似然降低最多15%,预测集缩小20%。
  • 适用于各类分类器集成,小规模集成也能媲美大模型,推理成本低。

本文研究训练好的分类器集成的后校准不确定性,关注标签噪声(偶然性不确定性)和模型本身(认知性不确定性)。现有主流校准方法如温度缩放和保形方法未能平衡两类不确定性,导致某些输入区域过度自信而另一些区域则过于保守。为此,提出简单高效的联合不确定性校准(JUCAL)算法,通过在验证集上优化负对数似然(NLL),联合校准用于加权和缩放两类不确定性的两个常数。JUCAL可应用于任意训练好的分类器集成(如Transformer、CNN或树模型),无需访问内部参数,计算开销极低。实验表明,在多种文本分类任务中,无论集成规模大小或集成策略如何,JUCAL均显著优于现有最优校准方法,最高使NLL降低15%、预测集大小减少20%。有趣的是,仅用5个模型的集成应用JUCAL,其表现即超越使用多达50个模型的温度缩放集成,推理成本降低最多达10倍。因此,建议将JUCAL作为分类集成校准的新标准方法。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

We study post-calibration uncertainty for trained ensembles of classifiers. Specifically, we consider both aleatoric (label noise) and epistemic (model) uncertainty. Among the most popular and widely used calibration methods in classification are temperature scaling (i.e., pool-then-calibrate) and conformal methods. However, the main shortcoming of these calibration methods is that they do not balance the proportion of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty. Not balancing these uncertainties can severely misrepresent predictive uncertainty, leading to overconfident predictions in some input regions while being underconfident in others. To address this shortcoming, we present a simple but powerful calibration algorithm Joint Uncertainty Calibration (JUCAL) that jointly calibrates aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty. JUCAL jointly calibrates two constants to weight and scale epistemic and aleatoric uncertainties by optimizing the negative log-likelihood (NLL) on the validation/calibration dataset. JUCAL can be applied to any trained ensemble of classifiers (e.g., transformers, CNNs, or tree-based methods), with minimal computational overhead, without requiring access to the models' internal parameters. We experimentally evaluate JUCAL on various text classification tasks, for ensembles of varying sizes and with different ensembling strategies. Our experiments show that JUCAL significantly outperforms SOTA calibration methods across all considered classification tasks, reducing NLL and predictive set size by up to 15% and 20%, respectively. Interestingly, even applying JUCAL to an ensemble of size 5 can outperform temperature-scaled ensembles of size up to 50 in terms of NLL and predictive set size, resulting in up to 10 times smaller inference costs. Thus, we propose JUCAL as a new go-to method for calibrating ensembles in classification.

不确定性校准集成学习分类模型NLL优化

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