Optimistic and Pessimistic Neural Networks for Scene and Object Recognition

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method for adjusting neural network predictions using uncertainty modeling, enabling the network to be optimistic or pessimistic, which improves performance in scene and object recognition tasks without additional training.

Contribution

The paper presents a new approach to incorporate uncertainty into CNN predictions, allowing for test-time adjustment of optimism or pessimism, and demonstrates its effectiveness in various vision tasks.

Findings

Uncertainty modeling improves CNN performance without retraining.

The method enhances object classification and detection accuracy.

Multilabel networks benefit significantly from the proposed approach.

Abstract

In this paper the application of uncertainty modeling to convolutional neural networks is evaluated. A novel method for adjusting the network's predictions based on uncertainty information is introduced. This allows the network to be either optimistic or pessimistic in its prediction scores. The proposed method builds on the idea of applying dropout at test time and sampling a predictive mean and variance from the network's output. Besides the methodological aspects, implementation details allowing for a fast evaluation are presented. Furthermore, a multilabel network architecture is introduced that strongly benefits from the presented approach. In the evaluation it will be shown that modeling uncertainty allows for improving the performance of a given model purely at test time without any further training steps. The evaluation considers several applications in the field of computer vision, including object classification and detection as well as scene attribute recognition.