English

Know Where To Drop Your Weights: Towards Faster Uncertainty Estimation

Machine Learning 2020-10-28 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

Estimating epistemic uncertainty of models used in low-latency applications and Out-Of-Distribution samples detection is a challenge due to the computationally demanding nature of uncertainty estimation techniques. Estimating model uncertainty using approximation techniques like Monte Carlo Dropout (MCD), DropConnect (MCDC) requires a large number of forward passes through the network, rendering them inapt for low-latency applications. We propose Select-DC which uses a subset of layers in a neural network to model epistemic uncertainty with MCDC. Through our experiments, we show a significant reduction in the GFLOPS required to model uncertainty, compared to Monte Carlo DropConnect, with marginal trade-off in performance. We perform a suite of experiments on CIFAR 10, CIFAR 100, and SVHN datasets with ResNet and VGG models. We further show how applying DropConnect to various layers in the network with different drop probabilities affects the networks performance and the entropy of the predictive distribution.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2010.14019,
  title  = {Know Where To Drop Your Weights: Towards Faster Uncertainty Estimation},
  author = {Akshatha Kamath and Dwaraknath Gnaneshwar and Matias Valdenegro-Toro},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.14019},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

8 pages, 6 figures, 1 table, with appendix, submitted to a NeurIPS workshop

R2 v1 2026-06-23T19:40:23.476Z