{"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/predicting-unreliable-predictions-by","title":"Test Sample Accuracy Scales with Training Sample Density in Neural Networks","arxiv_id":"2106.08365","date":"2021-06-15","proceeding":null,"authors":["Xu Ji","Razvan Pascanu","Devon Hjelm","Balaji Lakshminarayanan","Andrea Vedaldi"],"abstract":"Intuitively, one would expect accuracy of a trained neural network's prediction on test samples to correlate with how densely the samples are surrounded by seen training samples in representation space. We find that a bound on empirical training error smoothed across linear activation regions scales inversely with training sample density in representation space. Empirically, we verify this bound is a strong predictor of the inaccuracy of the network's prediction on test samples. For unseen test sets, including those with out-of-distribution samples, ranking test samples by their local region's error bound and discarding samples with the highest bounds raises prediction accuracy by up to 20% in absolute terms for image classification datasets, on average over thresholds.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.08365v7","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.08365v7.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":"predicting-unreliable-predictions-by","repo_url":"https://github.com/xu-ji/subfunctions","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"Image Classification"},{"task_slug":"prediction","task_name":"Prediction"},{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"image-classification"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2106.08365","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}