{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/estimating-uncertainty-in-multimodal","title":"Estimating Uncertainty in Multimodal Foundation Models using Public Internet Data","arxiv_id":"2310.09926","date":"2023-10-15","proceeding":null,"authors":["Shiladitya Dutta","Hongbo Wei","Lars van der Laan","Ahmed M. Alaa"],"abstract":"Foundation models are trained on vast amounts of data at scale using self-supervised learning, enabling adaptation to a wide range of downstream tasks. At test time, these models exhibit zero-shot capabilities through which they can classify previously unseen (user-specified) categories. In this paper, we address the problem of quantifying uncertainty in these zero-shot predictions. We propose a heuristic approach for uncertainty estimation in zero-shot settings using conformal prediction with web data. Given a set of classes at test time, we conduct zero-shot classification with CLIP-style models using a prompt template, e.g., \"an image of a <category>\", and use the same template as a search query to source calibration data from the open web. Given a web-based calibration set, we apply conformal prediction with a novel conformity score that accounts for potential errors in retrieved web data. We evaluate the utility of our proposed method in Biomedical foundation models; our preliminary results show that web-based conformal prediction sets achieve the target coverage with satisfactory efficiency on a variety of biomedical datasets.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.09926v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.09926v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"estimating-uncertainty-in-multimodal","repo_url":"https://github.com/alaalab/webcp","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"conformal-prediction","task_name":"Conformal Prediction"},{"task_slug":"prediction","task_name":"Prediction"},{"task_slug":"self-supervised-learning","task_name":"Self-Supervised Learning"},{"task_slug":"zero-shot-learning","task_name":"Zero-Shot Learning"},{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"zero-shot-classification"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}