Detecting Extrapolation with Local Ensembles

David Madras, James Atwood, Alexander D'Amour

Keywords: active learning, ensembles, reliability

Tues Session 4 (17:00-19:00 GMT) [Live QA] [Cal]
Tues Session 5 (20:00-22:00 GMT) [Live QA] [Cal]

Abstract: We present local ensembles, a method for detecting extrapolation at test time in a pre-trained model. We focus on underdetermination as a key component of extrapolation: we aim to detect when many possible predictions are consistent with the training data and model class. Our method uses local second-order information to approximate the variance of predictions across an ensemble of models from the same class. We compute this approximation by estimating the norm of the component of a test point's gradient that aligns with the low-curvature directions of the Hessian, and provide a tractable method for estimating this quantity. Experimentally, we show that our method is capable of detecting when a pre-trained model is extrapolating on test data, with applications to out-of-distribution detection, detecting spurious correlates, and active learning.

Similar Papers

Strategies for Pre-training Graph Neural Networks
Weihua Hu, Bowen Liu, Joseph Gomes, Marinka Zitnik, Percy Liang, Vijay Pande, Jure Leskovec,