Extracting Uncertainty Estimates from Mixtures of Experts for Semantic Segmentation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Pavlitska, Svetlana, Keskin, Beyza, Faßbender, Alwin, Hubschneider, Christian, Zöllner, J. Marius
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Pavlitska, Svetlana
Keskin, Beyza
Faßbender, Alwin
Hubschneider, Christian
Zöllner, J. Marius
author_facet Pavlitska, Svetlana
Keskin, Beyza
Faßbender, Alwin
Hubschneider, Christian
Zöllner, J. Marius
contents Estimating accurate and well-calibrated predictive uncertainty is important for enhancing the reliability of computer vision models, especially in safety-critical applications like traffic scene perception. While ensemble methods are commonly used to quantify uncertainty by combining multiple models, a mixture of experts (MoE) offers an efficient alternative by leveraging a gating network to dynamically weight expert predictions based on the input. Building on the promising use of MoEs for semantic segmentation in our previous works, we show that well-calibrated predictive uncertainty estimates can be extracted from MoEs without architectural modifications. We investigate three methods to extract predictive uncertainty estimates: predictive entropy, mutual information, and expert variance. We evaluate these methods for an MoE with two experts trained on a semantical split of the A2D2 dataset. Our results show that MoEs yield more reliable uncertainty estimates than ensembles in terms of conditional correctness metrics under out-of-distribution (OOD) data. Additionally, we evaluate routing uncertainty computed via gate entropy and find that simple gating mechanisms lead to better calibration of routing uncertainty estimates than more complex classwise gates. Finally, our experiments on the Cityscapes dataset suggest that increasing the number of experts can further enhance uncertainty calibration. Our code is available at https://github.com/KASTEL-MobilityLab/mixtures-of-experts/.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_04816
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Extracting Uncertainty Estimates from Mixtures of Experts for Semantic Segmentation
Pavlitska, Svetlana
Keskin, Beyza
Faßbender, Alwin
Hubschneider, Christian
Zöllner, J. Marius
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Estimating accurate and well-calibrated predictive uncertainty is important for enhancing the reliability of computer vision models, especially in safety-critical applications like traffic scene perception. While ensemble methods are commonly used to quantify uncertainty by combining multiple models, a mixture of experts (MoE) offers an efficient alternative by leveraging a gating network to dynamically weight expert predictions based on the input. Building on the promising use of MoEs for semantic segmentation in our previous works, we show that well-calibrated predictive uncertainty estimates can be extracted from MoEs without architectural modifications. We investigate three methods to extract predictive uncertainty estimates: predictive entropy, mutual information, and expert variance. We evaluate these methods for an MoE with two experts trained on a semantical split of the A2D2 dataset. Our results show that MoEs yield more reliable uncertainty estimates than ensembles in terms of conditional correctness metrics under out-of-distribution (OOD) data. Additionally, we evaluate routing uncertainty computed via gate entropy and find that simple gating mechanisms lead to better calibration of routing uncertainty estimates than more complex classwise gates. Finally, our experiments on the Cityscapes dataset suggest that increasing the number of experts can further enhance uncertainty calibration. Our code is available at https://github.com/KASTEL-MobilityLab/mixtures-of-experts/.
title Extracting Uncertainty Estimates from Mixtures of Experts for Semantic Segmentation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04816