Improving self-training under distribution shifts via anchored confidence with theoretical guarantees

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Joo, Taejong, Klabjan, Diego
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Joo, Taejong
Klabjan, Diego
author_facet Joo, Taejong
Klabjan, Diego
contents Self-training often falls short under distribution shifts due to an increased discrepancy between prediction confidence and actual accuracy. This typically necessitates computationally demanding methods such as neighborhood or ensemble-based label corrections. Drawing inspiration from insights on early learning regularization, we develop a principled method to improve self-training under distribution shifts based on temporal consistency. Specifically, we build an uncertainty-aware temporal ensemble with a simple relative thresholding. Then, this ensemble smooths noisy pseudo labels to promote selective temporal consistency. We show that our temporal ensemble is asymptotically correct and our label smoothing technique can reduce the optimality gap of self-training. Our extensive experiments validate that our approach consistently improves self-training performances by 8% to 16% across diverse distribution shift scenarios without a computational overhead. Besides, our method exhibits attractive properties, such as improved calibration performance and robustness to different hyperparameter choices.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_00586
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Improving self-training under distribution shifts via anchored confidence with theoretical guarantees
Joo, Taejong
Klabjan, Diego
Machine Learning
Self-training often falls short under distribution shifts due to an increased discrepancy between prediction confidence and actual accuracy. This typically necessitates computationally demanding methods such as neighborhood or ensemble-based label corrections. Drawing inspiration from insights on early learning regularization, we develop a principled method to improve self-training under distribution shifts based on temporal consistency. Specifically, we build an uncertainty-aware temporal ensemble with a simple relative thresholding. Then, this ensemble smooths noisy pseudo labels to promote selective temporal consistency. We show that our temporal ensemble is asymptotically correct and our label smoothing technique can reduce the optimality gap of self-training. Our extensive experiments validate that our approach consistently improves self-training performances by 8% to 16% across diverse distribution shift scenarios without a computational overhead. Besides, our method exhibits attractive properties, such as improved calibration performance and robustness to different hyperparameter choices.
title Improving self-training under distribution shifts via anchored confidence with theoretical guarantees
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.00586