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Main Authors: Shukla, Megh, Shameem, Aziz, Salzmann, Mathieu, Alahi, Alexandre
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.10587
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author Shukla, Megh
Shameem, Aziz
Salzmann, Mathieu
Alahi, Alexandre
author_facet Shukla, Megh
Shameem, Aziz
Salzmann, Mathieu
Alahi, Alexandre
contents Deep heteroscedastic regression models the mean and covariance of the target distribution through neural networks. The challenge arises from heteroscedasticity, which implies that the covariance is sample dependent and is often unknown. Consequently, recent methods learn the covariance through unsupervised frameworks, which unfortunately yield a trade-off between computational complexity and accuracy. While this trade-off could be alleviated through supervision, obtaining labels for the covariance is non-trivial. Here, we study self-supervised covariance estimation in deep heteroscedastic regression. We address two questions: (1) How should we supervise the covariance assuming ground truth is available? (2) How can we obtain pseudo labels in the absence of the ground-truth? We address (1) by analysing two popular measures: the KL Divergence and the 2-Wasserstein distance. Subsequently, we derive an upper bound on the 2-Wasserstein distance between normal distributions with non-commutative covariances that is stable to optimize. We address (2) through a simple neighborhood based heuristic algorithm which results in surprisingly effective pseudo labels for the covariance. Our experiments over a wide range of synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that the proposed 2-Wasserstein bound coupled with pseudo label annotations results in a computationally cheaper yet accurate deep heteroscedastic regression.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_10587
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Self-Supervised Covariance Estimation in Deep Heteroscedastic Regression
Shukla, Megh
Shameem, Aziz
Salzmann, Mathieu
Alahi, Alexandre
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Deep heteroscedastic regression models the mean and covariance of the target distribution through neural networks. The challenge arises from heteroscedasticity, which implies that the covariance is sample dependent and is often unknown. Consequently, recent methods learn the covariance through unsupervised frameworks, which unfortunately yield a trade-off between computational complexity and accuracy. While this trade-off could be alleviated through supervision, obtaining labels for the covariance is non-trivial. Here, we study self-supervised covariance estimation in deep heteroscedastic regression. We address two questions: (1) How should we supervise the covariance assuming ground truth is available? (2) How can we obtain pseudo labels in the absence of the ground-truth? We address (1) by analysing two popular measures: the KL Divergence and the 2-Wasserstein distance. Subsequently, we derive an upper bound on the 2-Wasserstein distance between normal distributions with non-commutative covariances that is stable to optimize. We address (2) through a simple neighborhood based heuristic algorithm which results in surprisingly effective pseudo labels for the covariance. Our experiments over a wide range of synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that the proposed 2-Wasserstein bound coupled with pseudo label annotations results in a computationally cheaper yet accurate deep heteroscedastic regression.
title Towards Self-Supervised Covariance Estimation in Deep Heteroscedastic Regression
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.10587