Margin and Consistency Supervision for Calibrated and Robust Vision Models

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1. Verfasser: Khazem, Salim
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Khazem, Salim
author_facet Khazem, Salim
contents Deep vision classifiers often achieve high accuracy while remaining poorly calibrated and fragile under small distribution shifts. We present Margin and Consistency Supervision (MaCS), a simple, architecture-agnostic regularization framework that jointly enforces logit-space separation and local prediction stability. MaCS augments cross-entropy with (i) a hinge-squared margin penalty that enforces a target logit gap between the correct class and the strongest competitor, and (ii) a consistency regularizer that minimizes the KL divergence between predictions on clean inputs and mildly perturbed views. We provide a unifying theoretical analysis showing that increasing classification margin while reducing local sensitivity formalized via a Lipschitz-type stability proxy yields improved generalization guarantees and a provable robustness radius bound scaling with the margin-to-sensitivity ratio. Across several image classification benchmarks and several backbones spanning CNNs and Vision Transformers, MaCS consistently improves calibration (lower ECE and NLL) and robustness to common corruptions while preserving or improving top-1 accuracy. Our approach requires no additional data, no architectural changes, and negligible inference overhead, making it an effective drop-in replacement for standard training objectives.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_05812
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Margin and Consistency Supervision for Calibrated and Robust Vision Models
Khazem, Salim
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Deep vision classifiers often achieve high accuracy while remaining poorly calibrated and fragile under small distribution shifts. We present Margin and Consistency Supervision (MaCS), a simple, architecture-agnostic regularization framework that jointly enforces logit-space separation and local prediction stability. MaCS augments cross-entropy with (i) a hinge-squared margin penalty that enforces a target logit gap between the correct class and the strongest competitor, and (ii) a consistency regularizer that minimizes the KL divergence between predictions on clean inputs and mildly perturbed views. We provide a unifying theoretical analysis showing that increasing classification margin while reducing local sensitivity formalized via a Lipschitz-type stability proxy yields improved generalization guarantees and a provable robustness radius bound scaling with the margin-to-sensitivity ratio. Across several image classification benchmarks and several backbones spanning CNNs and Vision Transformers, MaCS consistently improves calibration (lower ECE and NLL) and robustness to common corruptions while preserving or improving top-1 accuracy. Our approach requires no additional data, no architectural changes, and negligible inference overhead, making it an effective drop-in replacement for standard training objectives.
title Margin and Consistency Supervision for Calibrated and Robust Vision Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.05812