Papers › Known Unknowns: Uncertainty Quality in Bayesian Neural Networks

Known Unknowns: Uncertainty Quality in Bayesian Neural Networks

5 Dec 2016arXiv:1612.01251archive 2025-07-28

Ramon Oliveira, Pedro Tabacof, Eduardo Valle

We evaluate the uncertainty quality in neural networks using anomaly detection. We extract uncertainty measures (e.g. entropy) from the predictions of candidate models, use those measures as features for an anomaly detector, and gauge how well the detector differentiates known from unknown classes. We assign higher uncertainty quality to candidate models that lead to better detectors. We also propose a novel method for sampling a variational approximation of a Bayesian neural network, called One-Sample Bayesian Approximation (OSBA). We experiment on two datasets, MNIST and CIFAR10. We compare the following candidate neural network models: Maximum Likelihood, Bayesian Dropout, OSBA, and --- for MNIST --- the standard variational approximation. We show that Bayesian Dropout and OSBA provide better uncertainty information than Maximum Likelihood, and are essentially equivalent to the standard variational approximation, but much faster.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

ramon-oliveira/deepstats officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHub report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Anomaly DetectionKnown Unknowns

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Dropout

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections