This is a PyTorch implementation of the paper Evidential Deep Learning to Quantify Classification Uncertainty.
Dampster-Shafer Theory of Evidence assigns belief masses a set of classes (unlike assigning a probability to a single class). Sum of the masses of all subsets is . Individual class probabilities (plausibilities) can be derived from these masses.
Assigning a mass to the set of all classes means it can be any one of the classes; i.e. saying "I don't know".
If there are classes, we assign masses to each of the classes and an overall uncertainty mass to all classes.
Belief masses and can be computed from evidence , as and where . Paper uses term evidence as a measure of the amount of support collected from data in favor of a sample to be classified into a certain class.
This corresponds to a Dirichlet distribution with parameters , and is known as the Dirichlet strength. Dirichlet distribution is a distribution over categorical distribution; i.e. you can sample class probabilities from a Dirichlet distribution. The expected probability for class is .
We get the model to output evidences for a given input . We use a function such as ReLU or a Softplus at the final layer to get .
The paper proposes a few loss functions to train the model, which we have implemented below.
Here is the training code experiment.py
 to train a model on MNIST dataset.
54import torch
55
56from labml import tracker
57from labml_helpers.module import ModuleThe distribution is a prior on the likelihood , and the negative log marginal likelihood is calculated by integrating over class probabilities .
If target probabilities (one-hot targets) are for a given sample the loss is,
60class MaximumLikelihoodLoss(Module):evidence
 is  with shape [batch_size, n_classes]
 target
 is  with shape [batch_size, n_classes]
85    def forward(self, evidence: torch.Tensor, target: torch.Tensor):91        alpha = evidence + 1.93        strength = alpha.sum(dim=-1)Losses
96        loss = (target * (strength.log()[:, None] - alpha.log())).sum(dim=-1)Mean loss over the batch
99        return loss.mean()Bayes risk is the overall maximum cost of making incorrect estimates. It takes a cost function that gives the cost of making an incorrect estimate and sums it over all possible outcomes based on probability distribution.
Here the cost function is cross-entropy loss, for one-hot coded
We integrate this cost over all
where is the function.
102class CrossEntropyBayesRisk(Module):evidence
 is  with shape [batch_size, n_classes]
 target
 is  with shape [batch_size, n_classes]
132    def forward(self, evidence: torch.Tensor, target: torch.Tensor):138        alpha = evidence + 1.140        strength = alpha.sum(dim=-1)Losses
143        loss = (target * (torch.digamma(strength)[:, None] - torch.digamma(alpha))).sum(dim=-1)Mean loss over the batch
146        return loss.mean()Here the cost function is squared error,
We integrate this cost over all
Where is the expected probability when sampled from the Dirichlet distribution and where is the variance.
This gives,
This first part of the equation is the error term and the second part is the variance.
149class SquaredErrorBayesRisk(Module):evidence
 is  with shape [batch_size, n_classes]
 target
 is  with shape [batch_size, n_classes]
195    def forward(self, evidence: torch.Tensor, target: torch.Tensor):201        alpha = evidence + 1.203        strength = alpha.sum(dim=-1)205        p = alpha / strength[:, None]Error
208        err = (target - p) ** 2Variance
210        var = p * (1 - p) / (strength[:, None] + 1)Sum of them
213        loss = (err + var).sum(dim=-1)Mean loss over the batch
216        return loss.mean()This tries to shrink the total evidence to zero if the sample cannot be correctly classified.
First we calculate the Dirichlet parameters after remove the correct evidence.
where is the gamma function, is the function and
219class KLDivergenceLoss(Module):evidence
 is  with shape [batch_size, n_classes]
 target
 is  with shape [batch_size, n_classes]
243    def forward(self, evidence: torch.Tensor, target: torch.Tensor):249        alpha = evidence + 1.Number of classes
251        n_classes = evidence.shape[-1]Remove non-misleading evidence
254        alpha_tilde = target + (1 - target) * alpha256        strength_tilde = alpha_tilde.sum(dim=-1)267        first = (torch.lgamma(alpha_tilde.sum(dim=-1))
268                 - torch.lgamma(alpha_tilde.new_tensor(float(n_classes)))
269                 - (torch.lgamma(alpha_tilde)).sum(dim=-1))The second term
274        second = (
275                (alpha_tilde - 1) *
276                (torch.digamma(alpha_tilde) - torch.digamma(strength_tilde)[:, None])
277        ).sum(dim=-1)Sum of the terms
280        loss = first + secondMean loss over the batch
283        return loss.mean()286class TrackStatistics(Module):294    def forward(self, evidence: torch.Tensor, target: torch.Tensor):Number of classes
296        n_classes = evidence.shape[-1]Predictions that correctly match with the target (greedy sampling based on highest probability)
298        match = evidence.argmax(dim=-1).eq(target.argmax(dim=-1))Track accuracy
300        tracker.add('accuracy.', match.sum() / match.shape[0])303        alpha = evidence + 1.305        strength = alpha.sum(dim=-1)308        expected_probability = alpha / strength[:, None]Expected probability of the selected (greedy highset probability) class
310        expected_probability, _ = expected_probability.max(dim=-1)Uncertainty mass
313        uncertainty_mass = n_classes / strengthTrack for correctly predictions
316        tracker.add('u.succ.', uncertainty_mass.masked_select(match))Track for incorrect predictions
318        tracker.add('u.fail.', uncertainty_mass.masked_select(~match))Track for correctly predictions
320        tracker.add('prob.succ.', expected_probability.masked_select(match))Track for incorrect predictions
322        tracker.add('prob.fail.', expected_probability.masked_select(~match))