用视觉特征给古籍页精确到年份,还知道预测有多靠谱。
Probabilistic Dating of Historical Manuscripts via Evidential Deep Regression on Visual Script Features

- 把年代预测当连续回归问题,直接输出带不确定性的完整分布。
- 测试平均误差仅5.4年,93%的片段在5年内,比传统分类精度高得多。
- 能分解不确定性,识别高置信度片段,适合需要精准年代的学者。
我们提出一种基于视觉笔迹特征的古籍页面概率性年代推断方法。不同于以往将世纪归类的做法,本研究将年代预测建模为连续年轴上的证据深度回归问题,使神经网络能在单次前向传播中输出完整的预测分布,并分离出偶然性与认知性不确定性。模型采用EfficientNet-B2主干网络与正态逆伽马(NIG)输出头,通过联合负对数似然与证据正则化目标进行训练。在DIVA-HisDB基准数据集(150页,3部中世纪手稿,151,936个图像块)上,模型测试平均绝对误差(MAE)为5.4年,远低于50年世纪标签的粗粒度;93%的图像块预测误差在5年内,97%在10年内。模型达到最优的预测区间覆盖率(PICP=92.6%),且推理成本仅为MC Dropout的1/5,显著优于深度集成方法。不确定性分解显示,偶然性不确定性与预测误差强相关(斯皮尔曼ρ=0.729);对最可信20%图像块进行选择性预测,可将MAE降至0.5年。此外,预测不确定性随图像退化程度上升,空间分解图揭示导致不确定性的具体笔迹区域,页面级聚合进一步将MAE降低至4.5年,且页面级误差与不确定性间相关系数达ρ=0.905。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
We introduce a probabilistic approach for dating historical manuscript pages from visual features alone. Instead of aggregating centuries into classes as is standard in the previous literature, we pose dating as an evidential deep regression problem over a continuous year axis, allowing our neural network to output a full predictive distribution with decomposed aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty in a single forward pass. Our architecture combines an EfficientNet-B2 backbone with a Normal-Inverse-Gamma (NIG) output head trained with a joint negative-log-likelihood and evidence-regularization objective. On the DIVA-HisDB benchmark (150 pages, 3 medieval codices, 151,936 patches), our model scores a test MAE of 5.4 years, well below the 50-year century-label supervision granularity, with 93\% of patches within 5 years and 97\% within 10 years. Our approach achieves \textbf{PICP=92.6\%}, the best calibration among all compared methods, in a single forward pass, outperforming MC Dropout (PICP=88.2\%, 50 passes) and Deep Ensembles (PICP=79.7\%, 5 models) at $5\times$ lower inference cost. Uncertainty decomposition shows aleatoric uncertainty is a strong predictor of dating error (Spearman $ρ=0.729$), and a selective prediction about the most certain 20\% of patches can provide \textbf{0.5 years MAE}. We show that predicted uncertainty increases as image degradation worsens, spatial decomposition maps explain which script regions cause aleatoric uncertainty, and page-level aggregation reduces MAE to 4.5 years with $ρ=0.905$ between uncertainty and page-level error.
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