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research article

A t-distribution based operator for enhancing out of distribution robustness of neural network classifiers

Antonello, Niccolò
•
Garner, Philip N.  
2020
IEEE Signal Processing Letters

Neural Network (NN) classifiers can assign extreme probabilities to samples that have not appeared during training (out-of-distribution samples) resulting in erroneous and unreliable predictions. One of the causes for this unwanted behaviour lies in the use of the standard softmax operator which pushes the posterior probabilities to be either zero or unity hence failing to model uncertainty. The statistical derivation of the softmax operator relies on the assumption that the distributions of the latent variables for a given class are Gaussian with known variance. However, it is possible to use different assumptions in the same derivation and attain from other families of distributions as well. This allows derivation of novel operators with more favourable properties. Here, a novel operator is proposed that is derived using t-distributions which are capable of providing a better description of uncertainty. It is shown that classifiers that adopt this novel operator can be more robust to out of distribution samples, often outperforming NNs that use the standard softmax operator. These enhancements can be reached with minimal changes to the NN architecture.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1109/LSP.2020.3001843
Author(s)
Antonello, Niccolò
Garner, Philip N.  
Date Issued

2020

Publisher

IEEE Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

Published in
IEEE Signal Processing Letters
Volume

27

Start page

1070

End page

1074

URL

Link to IDIAP database

http://publications.idiap.ch/downloads/papers/2020/Antonello_SPL_2020.pdf
Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LIDIAP  
Available on Infoscience
April 13, 2021
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/177243
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