Are vision language models robust to uncertain inputs?

Robustness against uncertain and ambiguous inputs is a critical challenge for deep learning models. While recent advancements in large scale vision language models (VLMs, e.g. GPT4o) might suggest that increasing model and training dataset size would mitigate this issue, our empirical evaluation shows a more complicated picture. Testing models using two classic uncertainty quantification tasks, anomaly detection and classification under inherently ambiguous conditions, we find that newer and larger VLMs indeed exhibit improved robustness compared to earlier models, but still suffer from a tendency to strictly follow instructions, often causing them to hallucinate confident responses even when faced with unclear or anomalous inputs. Remarkably, for natural images such as ImageNet, this limitation can be overcome without pipeline modifications: simply prompting models to abstain from uncertain predictions enables significant reliability gains, achieving near-perfect robustness in several settings. However, for domain-specific tasks such as galaxy morphology classification, a lack of specialized knowledge prevents reliable uncertainty estimation. Finally, we propose a novel mechanism based on caption diversity to reveal a model's internal uncertainty, enabling practitioners to predict when models will successfully abstain without relying on labeled data.

Generative Uncertainty in Diffusion Models

Diffusion models have recently driven significant breakthroughs in generative modeling. While state-of-the-art models produce high-quality samples on average, individual samples can still be low quality. Detecting such samples without human inspection remains a challenging task. To address this, we propose a Bayesian framework for estimating generative uncertainty of synthetic samples. We outline how to make Bayesian inference practical for large, modern generative models and introduce a new semantic likelihood (evaluated in the latent space of a feature extractor) to address the challenges posed by high-dimensional sample spaces. Through our experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed generative uncertainty effectively identifies poor-quality samples and significantly outperforms existing uncertainty-based methods. Notably, our Bayesian framework can be applied post-hoc to any pretrained diffusion or flow matching model (via the Laplace approximation), and we propose simple yet effective techniques to minimize its computational overhead during sampling.

On Calibration in Multi-Distribution Learning

Modern challenges of robustness, fairness, and decision-making in machine learning have led to the formulation of multi-distribution learning (MDL) frameworks in which a predictor is optimized across multiple distributions. We study the calibration properties of MDL to better understand how the predictor performs uniformly across the multiple distributions. Through classical results on decomposing proper scoring losses, we first derive the Bayes optimal rule for MDL, demonstrating that it maximizes the generalized entropy of the associated loss function. Our analysis reveals that while this approach ensures minimal worst-case loss, it can lead to non-uniform calibration errors across the multiple distributions and there is an inherent calibration-refinement trade-off, even at Bayes optimality. Our results highlight a critical limitation: despite the promise of MDL, one must use caution when designing predictors tailored to multiple distributions so as to minimize disparity.

ELBOing Stein: Variational Bayes with Stein Mixture Inference

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) [Liu and Wang, 2016] performs approximate Bayesian inference by representing the posterior with a set of particles. However, SVGD suffers from variance collapse, i.e. poor predictions due to underestimating uncertainty [Ba et al., 2021], even for moderately-dimensional models such as small Bayesian neural networks (BNNs). To address this issue, we generalize SVGD by letting each particle parameterize a component distribution in a mixture model. Our method, Stein Mixture Inference (SMI), optimizes a lower bound to the evidence (ELBO) and introduces user-specified guides parameterized by particles. SMI extends the Nonlinear SVGD framework [Wang and Liu, 2019] to the case of variational Bayes. SMI effectively avoids variance collapse, judging by a previously described test developed for this purpose, and performs well on standard data sets. In addition, SMI requires considerably fewer particles than SVGD to accurately estimate uncertainty for small BNNs. The synergistic combination of NSVGD, ELBO optimization and user-specified guides establishes a promising approach towards variational Bayesian inference in the case of tall and wide data.

DefVerify: Do Hate Speech Models Reflect Their Dataset's Definition?

When building a predictive model, it is often difficult to ensure that domain-specific requirements are encoded by the model that will eventually be deployed. Consider researchers working on hate speech detection. They will have an idea of what is considered hate speech, but building a model that reflects their view accurately requires preserving those ideals throughout the workflow of data set construction and model training. Complications such as sampling bias, annotation bias, and model misspecification almost always arise, possibly resulting in a gap between the domain specification and the model's actual behavior upon deployment. To address this issue for hate speech detection, we propose DefVerify: a 3-step procedure that (i) encodes a user-specified definition of hate speech, (ii) quantifies to what extent the model reflects the intended definition, and (iii) tries to identify the point of failure in the workflow. We use DefVerify to find gaps between definition and model behavior when applied to six popular hate speech benchmark datasets.

Lightning UQ Box: A Comprehensive Framework for Uncertainty Quantification in Deep Learning

Uncertainty quantification (UQ) is an essential tool for applying deep neural networks (DNNs) to real world tasks, as it attaches a degree of confidence to DNN outputs. However, despite its benefits, UQ is often left out of the standard DNN workflow due to the additional technical knowledge required to apply and evaluate existing UQ procedures. Hence there is a need for a comprehensive toolbox that allows the user to integrate UQ into their modelling workflow, without significant overhead. We introduce \texttt{Lightning UQ Box}: a unified interface for applying and evaluating various approaches to UQ. In this paper, we provide a theoretical and quantitative comparison of the wide range of state-of-the-art UQ methods implemented in our toolbox. We focus on two challenging vision tasks: (i) estimating tropical cyclone wind speeds from infrared satellite imagery and (ii) estimating the power output of solar panels from RGB images of the sky. By highlighting the differences between methods our results demonstrate the need for a broad and approachable experimental framework for UQ, that can be used for benchmarking UQ methods. The toolbox, example implementations, and further information are available at: https://github.com/lightning-uq-box/lightning-uq-box

Crowd-Calibrator: Can Annotator Disagreement Inform Calibration in Subjective Tasks?

Subjective tasks in NLP have been mostly relegated to objective standards, where the gold label is decided by taking the majority vote. This obfuscates annotator disagreement and the inherent uncertainty of the label. We argue that subjectivity should factor into model decisions and play a direct role via calibration under a selective prediction setting. Specifically, instead of calibrating confidence purely from the model's perspective, we calibrate models for subjective tasks based on crowd worker agreement. Our method, Crowd-Calibrator, models the distance between the distribution of crowd worker labels and the model's own distribution over labels to inform whether the model should abstain from a decision. On two highly subjective tasks, hate speech detection and natural language inference, our experiments show Crowd-Calibrator either outperforms or achieves competitive performance with existing selective prediction baselines. Our findings highlight the value of bringing human decision-making into model predictions.

Test-Time Adaptation with State-Space Models

Distribution shifts between training and test data are all but inevitable over the lifecycle of a deployed model and lead to performance decay. Adapting the model can hopefully mitigate this drop in performance. Yet, adaptation is challenging since it must be unsupervised: we usually do not have access to any labeled data at test time. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic state-space model that can adapt a deployed model subjected to distribution drift. Our model learns the dynamics induced by distribution shifts on the last set of hidden features. Without requiring labels, we infer time-evolving class prototypes that serve as a dynamic classification head. Moreover, our approach is lightweight, modifying only the model's last linear layer. In experiments on real-world distribution shifts and synthetic corruptions, we demonstrate that our approach performs competitively with methods that require back-propagation and access to the model backbone. Our model especially excels in the case of small test batches - the most difficult setting.

Fast yet Safe: Early-Exiting with Risk Control

Scaling machine learning models significantly improves their performance. However, such gains come at the cost of inference being slow and resource-intensive. Early-exit neural networks (EENNs) offer a promising solution: they accelerate inference by allowing intermediate layers to exit and produce a prediction early. Yet a fundamental issue with EENNs is how to determine when to exit without severely degrading performance. In other words, when is it 'safe' for an EENN to go 'fast'? To address this issue, we investigate how to adapt frameworks of risk control to EENNs. Risk control offers a distribution-free, post-hoc solution that tunes the EENN's exiting mechanism so that exits only occur when the output is of sufficient quality. We empirically validate our insights on a range of vision and language tasks, demonstrating that risk control can produce substantial computational savings, all the while preserving user-specified performance goals.

Uncertainty Aware Tropical Cyclone Wind Speed Estimation from Satellite Data

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been successfully applied to earth observation (EO) data and opened new research avenues. Despite the theoretical and practical advances of these techniques, DNNs are still considered black box tools and by default are designed to give point predictions. However, the majority of EO applications demand reliable uncertainty estimates that can support practitioners in critical decision making tasks. This work provides a theoretical and quantitative comparison of existing uncertainty quantification methods for DNNs applied to the task of wind speed estimation in satellite imagery of tropical cyclones. We provide a detailed evaluation of predictive uncertainty estimates from state-of-the-art uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods for DNNs. We find that predictive uncertainties can be utilized to further improve accuracy and analyze the predictive uncertainties of different methods across storm categories.