% Self-supervised learning methods have shown promising results across a wide range of tasks in computer vision, natural language processing, and multimodal analysis. However, self-supervised approaches come with a notable limitation, dimensional collapse, where a model doesn't fully utilize its capacity to encode information optimally. Motivated by this, we propose ProSMin, a novel probabilistic self-supervised learning approach that leverages the power of probabilistic models to enhance representation quality and mitigate collapsing representations. Our proposed approach involves two neural networks, the online network and the target network, which collaborate and learn the diverse distribution of representations from each other through probabilistic knowledge distillation. The two networks are trained via our new loss function based on proper scoring rules. We provide a theoretical justification for ProSMin and demonstrate its modified scoring rule. This insight validates the method's optimization process and contributes to its robustness and effectiveness in improving representation quality. We evaluate our probabilistic model on various downstream tasks, such as in-distribution generalization, out-of-distribution detection, dataset corruption, low-shot learning, and transfer learning. Our method achieves superior accuracy and calibration, outperforming the self-supervised baseline in a variety of experiments on large datasets such as ImageNet-O and ImageNet-C. ProSMin thus demonstrates its scalability and real-world applicability. Our code is publicly available: https://github.com/amirvhd/SSL-sore-rule.

A major challenge in sample-based inference (SBI) for Bayesian neural networks is the size and structure of the networks’ parameter space. Our work shows that successful SBI is possible by embracing the characteristic relationship between weight and function space, uncovering a systematic link between overparameterization and the difficulty of the sampling problem. Through extensive experiments, we establish practical guidelines for sampling and convergence diagnosis. As a result, we present a deep ensemble initialized approach as an effective solution with competitive performance and uncertainty quantification.

We present a novel approach to uncertainty quantification in classification tasks based on label-wise decomposition of uncertainty measures. This label-wise perspective allows uncertainty to be quantified at the individual class level, thereby improving cost-sensitive decision-making and helping understand the sources of uncertainty. Furthermore, it allows to define total, aleatoric, and epistemic uncertainty on the basis of non-categorical measures such as variance, going beyond common entropy-based measures. In particular, variance-based measures address some of the limitations associated with established methods that have recently been discussed in the literature. We show that our proposed measures adhere to a number of desirable properties. Through empirical evaluation on a variety of benchmark data sets – including applications in the medical domain where accurate uncertainty quantification is crucial – we establish the effectiveness of label-wise uncertainty quantification.

The quantification of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty in terms of conditional entropy and mutual information, respectively, has recently become quite common in machine learning. While the properties of these measures, which are rooted in information theory, seem appealing at first glance, we identify various incoherencies that call their appropriateness into question. In addition to the measures themselves, we critically discuss the idea of an additive decomposition of total uncertainty into its aleatoric and epistemic constituents. Experiments across different computer vision tasks support our theoretical findings and raise concerns about current practice in uncertainty quantification.