Abstract:This paper presents an innovative approach, called credal wrapper, to formulating a credal set representation of model averaging for Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) and deep ensembles, capable of improving uncertainty estimation in classification tasks. Given a finite collection of single distributions derived from BNNs or deep ensembles, the proposed approach extracts an upper and a lower probability bound per class, acknowledging the epistemic uncertainty due to the availability of a limited amount of sampled predictive distributions. Such probability intervals over classes can be mapped on a convex set of probabilities (a 'credal set') from which, in turn, a unique prediction can be obtained using a transformation called 'intersection probability transformation'. In this article, we conduct extensive experiments on multiple out-of-distribution (OOD) detection benchmarks, encompassing various dataset pairs (CIFAR10/100 vs SVHN/Tiny-ImageNet, CIFAR10 vs CIFAR10-C, CIFAR100 vs CIFAR100-C and ImageNet vs ImageNet-O) and using different network architectures (such as VGG16, Res18/50, EfficientNet B2, and ViT Base). Compared to BNN and deep ensemble baselines, the proposed credal representation methodology exhibits superior performance in uncertainty estimation and achieves lower expected calibration error on OOD samples.
Abstract:Uncertainty estimation is increasingly attractive for improving the reliability of neural networks. In this work, we present novel credal-set interval neural networks (CreINNs) designed for classification tasks. CreINNs preserve the traditional interval neural network structure, capturing weight uncertainty through deterministic intervals, while forecasting credal sets using the mathematical framework of probability intervals. Experimental validations on an out-of-distribution detection benchmark (CIFAR10 vs SVHN) showcase that CreINNs outperform epistemic uncertainty estimation when compared to variational Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) and deep ensembles (DEs). Furthermore, CreINNs exhibit a notable reduction in computational complexity compared to variational BNNs and demonstrate smaller model sizes than DEs.
Abstract:Optimization equips engineers and scientists in a variety of fields with the ability to transcribe their problems into a generic formulation and receive optimal solutions with relative ease. Industries ranging from aerospace to robotics continue to benefit from advancements in optimization theory and the associated algorithmic developments. Nowadays, optimization is used in real time on autonomous systems acting in safety critical situations, such as self-driving vehicles. It has become increasingly more important to produce robust solutions by incorporating uncertainty into optimization programs. This paper provides a short survey about the state of the art in optimization under uncertainty. The paper begins with a brief overview of the main classes of optimization without uncertainty. The rest of the paper focuses on the different methods for handling both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty. Many of the applications discussed in this paper are within the domain of control. The goal of this survey paper is to briefly touch upon the state of the art in a variety of different methods and refer the reader to other literature for more in-depth treatments of the topics discussed here.
Abstract:Unhealthy dietary habits are considered as the primary cause of multiple chronic diseases such as obesity and diabetes. The automatic food intake monitoring system has the potential to improve the quality of life (QoF) of people with dietary related diseases through dietary assessment. In this work, we propose a novel contact-less radar-based food intake monitoring approach. Specifically, a Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar sensor is employed to recognize fine-grained eating and drinking gestures. The fine-grained eating/drinking gesture contains a series of movement from raising the hand to the mouth until putting away the hand from the mouth. A 3D temporal convolutional network (3D-TCN) is developed to detect and segment eating and drinking gestures in meal sessions by processing the Range-Doppler Cube (RD Cube). Unlike previous radar-based research, this work collects data in continuous meal sessions. We create a public dataset that contains 48 meal sessions (3121 eating gestures and 608 drinking gestures) from 48 participants with a total duration of 783 minutes. Four eating styles (fork & knife, chopsticks, spoon, hand) are included in this dataset. To validate the performance of the proposed approach, 8-fold cross validation method is applied. Experimental results show that our proposed 3D-TCN outperforms the model that combines a convolutional neural network and a long-short-term-memory network (CNN-LSTM), and also the CNN-Bidirectional LSTM model (CNN-BiLSTM) in eating and drinking gesture detection. The 3D-TCN model achieves a segmental F1-score of 0.887 and 0.844 for eating and drinking gestures, respectively. The results of the proposed approach indicate the feasibility of using radar for fine-grained eating and drinking gesture detection and segmentation in meal sessions.