Papers › Calibration by Distribution Matching: Trainable Kernel Calibration Metrics

Calibration by Distribution Matching: Trainable Kernel Calibration Metrics

31 Oct 2023NeurIPS 2023 11arXiv:2310.20211archive 2025-07-28

Charles Marx, Sofian Zalouk, Stefano Ermon

Calibration ensures that probabilistic forecasts meaningfully capture uncertainty by requiring that predicted probabilities align with empirical frequencies. However, many existing calibration methods are specialized for post-hoc recalibration, which can worsen the sharpness of forecasts. Drawing on the insight that calibration can be viewed as a distribution matching task, we introduce kernel-based calibration metrics that unify and generalize popular forms of calibration for both classification and regression. These metrics admit differentiable sample estimates, making it easy to incorporate a calibration objective into empirical risk minimization. Furthermore, we provide intuitive mechanisms to tailor calibration metrics to a decision task, and enforce accurate loss estimation and no regret decisions. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that employing these metrics as regularizers enhances calibration, sharpness, and decision-making across a range of regression and classification tasks, outperforming methods relying solely on post-hoc recalibration.

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data_loader kernel-calibration/kernel-calibration/torchuq/dataset/imagenet.py official repository ran MIT (permissive) · d8e925ee6db84c87 · report
dirichlet_kernel kernel-calibration/kernel-calibration/src/utils/ece_kde_utils.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · 9bc246bd29ace132 · report
get_kernel kernel-calibration/kernel-calibration/src/utils/ece_kde_utils.py official repository ran fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · 2f2e94d3c1dd5aa5 · report
gmm_cdf kernel-calibration/kernel-calibration/src/utils/gmm_utils.py official repository ran MIT (permissive) · 4c0ab312755fbd43 · report
gmm_params_to_dist kernel-calibration/kernel-calibration/src/utils/gmm_utils.py official repository ran MIT (permissive) · a99b14e0722ef72b · report
loss_fn_1 kernel-calibration/kernel-calibration/src/metrics/decision_losses.py official repository ran fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · fd941cc0cae06a27 · report
mean_no_diag kernel-calibration/kernel-calibration/src/metrics/losses.py official repository ran fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · 42cdc115301b8340 · report
rbf_kernel kernel-calibration/kernel-calibration/src/metrics/losses.py official repository ran fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · cc30d0408372ef42 · report
tanh_kernel kernel-calibration/kernel-calibration/src/metrics/losses.py official repository ran MIT (permissive) · c2a7bb7f129c023a · report
train_dataset kernel-calibration/kernel-calibration/torchuq/dataset/imagenet.py official repository ran MIT (permissive) · d01f287e5bdb423e · report
val_dataset kernel-calibration/kernel-calibration/torchuq/dataset/imagenet.py official repository ran MIT (permissive) · 4b7a8ee9ac4d3903 · report
beta_kernel kernel-calibration/kernel-calibration/src/utils/ece_kde_utils.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 1229a437a6fcfedf · report
gmm_cdf_dist kernel-calibration/kernel-calibration/src/utils/gmm_utils.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 81eeafdfab05075d · report

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