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Decomposing predictive uncertainty into epistemic (model ignorance) and aleatoric (data ambiguity) components is central to reliable decision making, yet most methods estimate both from the same predictive distribution. Recent empirical and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Tanmoy Mukherjee , Marius Kloft , Pierre Marquis , Zied Bouraoui

It is well known that accurate probabilistic predictors can be trained through empirical risk minimisation with proper scoring rules as loss functions. While such learners capture so-called aleatoric uncertainty of predictions, various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Viktor Bengs , Eyke Hüllermeier , Willem Waegeman

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems accelerate medical workflows and improve diagnostic accuracy in healthcare, serving as second-opinion systems. However, the unpredictability of AI errors poses a significant challenge, particularly in…

Reinforcement learning agents are faced with two types of uncertainty. Epistemic uncertainty stems from limited data and is useful for exploration, whereas aleatoric uncertainty arises from stochastic environments and must be accounted for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-10 William R. Clements , Bastien Van Delft , Benoît-Marie Robaglia , Reda Bahi Slaoui , Sébastien Toth

Ordinal classification problems, where labels exhibit a natural order, are prevalent in high-stakes fields such as medicine and finance. Accurate uncertainty quantification, including the decomposition into aleatoric (inherent variability)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-02 Stefan Haas , Eyke Hüllermeier

We address the problem of uncertainty quantification and propose measures of total, aleatoric, and epistemic uncertainty based on a known decomposition of (strictly) proper scoring rules, a specific type of loss function, into a divergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Paul Hofman , Yusuf Sale , Eyke Hüllermeier

Modern machine learning methods including deep learning have achieved great success in predictive accuracy for supervised learning tasks, but may still fall short in giving useful estimates of their predictive {\em uncertainty}. Quantifying…

Epistemic uncertainty quantification (UQ) identifies where models lack knowledge. Traditional UQ methods, often based on Bayesian neural networks, are not suitable for pre-trained non-Bayesian models. Our study addresses quantifying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-17 Hanjing Wang , Qiang Ji

Most estimators collapse all uncertainty modes into a single confidence score, preventing reliable reasoning about when to allocate more compute or adjust inference. We introduce Uncertainty-Guided Inference-Time Selection, a lightweight…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Divake Kumar , Patrick Poggi , Sina Tayebati , Devashri Naik , Nilesh Ahuja , Amit Ranjan Trivedi

Characterizing aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty on the predicted rewards can help in building reliable reinforcement learning (RL) systems. Aleatoric uncertainty results from the irreducible environment stochasticity leading to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-06 Bertrand Charpentier , Ransalu Senanayake , Mykel Kochenderfer , Stephan Günnemann

An artificial intelligence (AI) model can be viewed as a function that maps inputs to outputs in high-dimensional spaces. Once designed and well trained, the AI model is applied for inference. However, even optimized AI models can produce…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Sha Hu

Epistemic Uncertainty is a measure of the lack of knowledge of a learner which diminishes with more evidence. While existing work focuses on using the variance of the Bayesian posterior due to parameter uncertainty as a measure of epistemic…

Uncertainty estimation is pivotal in machine learning, especially for classification tasks, as it improves the robustness and reliability of models. We introduce a novel `Epistemic Wrapping' methodology aimed at improving uncertainty…

Estimating and disentangling epistemic uncertainty, uncertainty that is reducible with more training data, and aleatoric uncertainty, uncertainty that is inherent to the task at hand, is critically important when applying machine learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-08 Matthew A. Chan , Maria J. Molina , Christopher A. Metzler

We consider the problem of uncertainty estimation in the context of (non-Bayesian) deep neural classification. In this context, all known methods are based on extracting uncertainty signals from a trained network optimized to solve the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-25 Yonatan Geifman , Guy Uziel , Ran El-Yaniv

Recent research reveals that machine learning (ML) models are highly sensitive to minor changes in their training procedure, such as the inclusion or exclusion of a single data point, leading to conflicting predictions on individual data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Falaah Arif Khan , Denys Herasymuk , Nazar Protsiv , Julia Stoyanovich

We propose a new optimization framework for aleatoric uncertainty estimation in regression problems. Existing methods can quantify the error in the target estimation, but they tend to underestimate it. To obtain the predictive uncertainty…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-03-12 Takumi Kawashima , Qing Yu , Akari Asai , Daiki Ikami , Kiyoharu Aizawa

Rigorous statistical methods, including parameter estimation with accompanying uncertainties, underpin the validity of scientific discovery, especially in the natural sciences. With increasingly complex data models such as deep learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Aurora Grefsrud , Nello Blaser , Trygve Buanes

Bayesian inference is often utilized for uncertainty quantification tasks. A recent analysis by Xu and Raginsky 2022 rigorously decomposed the predictive uncertainty in Bayesian inference into two uncertainties, called aleatoric and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-25 Futoshi Futami , Tomoharu Iwata

In context-specific applications such as robotics, telecommunications, and healthcare, artificial intelligence systems often face the challenge of limited training data. This scarcity introduces epistemic uncertainty, i.e., reducible…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Osvaldo Simeone , Yaniv Romano