Diversity-enhanced Probabilistic Ensemble For Uncertainty Estimation

Hanjing Wang, Qiang Ji

Keywords: Uncertainty Quantification, Ensemble Methods, Diversity-enhanced Learning

Abstract: Ensemble methods combine multiple individual models for prediction, which have demonstrated their effectiveness in accurate uncertainty quantification (UQ) and strong robustness. Obtaining a diverse ensemble set of model parameters results in better model averaging performance and better approximation of the true posterior distribution of these parameters. In this paper, we propose the diversity-enhanced probabilistic ensemble method with the adaptive uncertainty-guided ensemble learning strategy for better quantifying uncertainty and further improving the model robustness. Specifically, we construct the probabilistic ensemble model by building a Gaussian distribution of the model parameters for each ensemble component using Laplacian approximation in a post-processing manner. Then a mixture of Gaussian model is established with learnable and refinable parameters in an EM-like algorithm. During ensemble training, we leverage the uncertainty estimated from previous models as guidance when training the next one such that the new model will focus more on the less explored regions by previous models. Various experiments including out-of-distribution detection and image classification under distributional shifts have demonstrated better uncertainty estimation and improved model generalization ability of our proposed method.