Posted by Zachary Nado, Research Engineer and Dustin Tran, Research Scientist, Google Research, Brain Team
Machine learning (ML) is increasingly being used in real-world applications, so understanding the uncertainty and robustness of a model is necessary to ensure performance in practice. For example, how do models behave when deployed on data that differs from the data on which they were trained? How do models signal when they are likely to make a mistake?
To get a handle on an ML model’s behavior, its performance is often measured against a baseline for the task of interest. With each baseline, researchers must try to reproduce results only using descriptions from the corresponding papers , which results in serious challenges for replication. Having access to the code for experiments may be more useful, assuming it is well-documented and maintained. But even this is not enough, because the baselines must be rigorously validated. For example, in retrospective analyses over a collection of works [1, 2, 3], authors often find that a simple well-tuned baseline outperforms more sophisticated methods. In order to truly understand how models perform relative to each other, and enable researchers to measure whether new ideas in fact yield meaningful progress, models of interest must be compared to a common baseline.
In “Uncertainty Baselines: Benchmarks for Uncertainty & Robustness in Deep Learning”, we introduce Uncertainty Baselines, a collection of high-quality implementations of standard and state-of-the-art deep learning methods for a variety of tasks, with the goal of making research on uncertainty and robustness more reproducible. The collection spans 19 methods across nine tasks, each with at least five metrics. Each baseline is a self-contained experiment pipeline with easily reusable and extendable components and with minimal dependencies outside of the framework in which it is written. The included pipelines are implemented in TensorFlow, PyTorch, and Jax. Additionally, the hyperparameters for each baseline have been extensively tuned over numerous iterations so as to provide even stronger results.
Uncertainty Baselines
As of this writing, Uncertainty Baselines provides a total of 83 baselines, comprising 19 methods encompassing standard and more recent strategies over nine datasets. Example methods include BatchEnsemble, Deep Ensembles, Rank-1 Bayesian Neural Nets, Monte Carlo Dropout, and Spectral-normalized Neural Gaussian Processes. It acts as a successor in merging several popular benchmarks in the community: Can You Trust Your Model’s Uncertainty?, BDL benchmarks, and Edward2’s baselines.
| Dataset | Inputs | Output | Train Examples | Test Datasets |
| CIFAR | RGB images | 10-class distribution | 50,000 | 3 |
| ImageNet | RGB images | 1000-class distribution | 1,281,167 | 6 |
| CLINC Intent Detection | Dialog system query text | 150-class distribution (in 10 domains) | 15,000 | 2 |
| Kaggle’s Diabetic Retinopathy Detection | RGB images | Probability of Diabetic Retinopathy | 35,126 | 1 |
| Wikipedia Toxicity | Wikipedia comment text | Probability of toxicity | 159,571 | 3 |
A subset of 5 out of 9 available datasets for which baselines are provided. The datasets span tabular, text, and image modalities.
Uncertainty Baselines sets up each baseline under a choice of base model, training dataset, and a suite of evaluation metrics. Each is then tuned over its hyperparameters to maximize performance on such metrics. The available baselines vary among these three axes:
- Base models (architectures) include Wide ResNet 28-10, ResNet-50, BERT, and simple fully-connected networks.
- Training datasets include standard machine learning datasets (CIFAR, ImageNet, and UCI) as well as more real-world problems (Clinc Intent Detection, Kaggle’s Diabetic Retinopathy Detection, and Wikipedia Toxicity).
- Evaluation includes predictive metrics (e.g., accuracy), uncertainty metrics (e.g., selective prediction and calibration error), compute metrics (inference latency), and performance on in- and out-of-distribution datasets.
Modularity and Reusability
In order for researchers to use and build on the baselines, we deliberately optimized them to be as modular and minimal as possible. As seen in the workflow figure below, Uncertainty Baselines introduces no new class abstractions, instead reusing classes that pre-exist in the ecosystem (e.g., TensorFlow’s tf.data.Dataset). The train/evaluation pipeline for each of the baselines is contained in a standalone Python file for that experiment, which can run on CPU, GPU, or Google Cloud TPUs. Because of this independence between baselines, we are able to develop baselines in any of TensorFlow, PyTorch or JAX.
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| Workflow diagram for how the different components of Uncertainty Baselines are structured. All datasets are subclasses of the BaseDataset class, which provides a simple API for use in baselines written with any of the supported frameworks. The outputs from any of the baselines can then be analyzed with the Robustness Metrics library. |
One area of debate among research engineers is how to manage hyperparameters and other experiment configuration values, which can easily number in the dozens. Instead of using one of the many frameworks built for this, and risk users having to learn yet another library, we opted to simply use Python flags, i.e., flags defined using Abseil that follow Python conventions. This should be a familiar technique to most researchers, and is easy to extend and plug into other pipelines.
Reproducibility
In addition to being able to run each of our baselines using the documented commands and get the same reported results, we also aim to release hyperparameter tuning results and final model checkpoints for further reproducibility. Right now we only have these fully open-sourced for the Diabetic Retinopathy baselines, but we will continue to upload more results as we run them. Additionally, we have examples of baselines that are exactly reproducible up to hardware determinism.
Practical Impact
Each of the baselines included in our repository has gone through extensive hyperparameter tuning, and we hope that researchers can readily reuse this effort without the need for expensive retraining or retuning. Additionally, we hope to avoid minor differences in the pipeline implementations affecting baseline comparisons.
Uncertainty Baselines has already been used in numerous research projects. If you are a researcher with other methods or datasets you would like to contribute, please open a GitHub issue to start a discussion!
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank a number of folks who are codevelopers, provided guidance, and/or helped review this post: Neil Band, Mark Collier, Josip Djolonga, Michael W. Dusenberry, Sebastian Farquhar, Angelos Filos, Marton Havasi, Rodolphe Jenatton, Ghassen Jerfel, Jeremiah Liu, Zelda Mariet, Jeremy Nixon, Shreyas Padhy, Jie Ren, Tim G. J. Rudner, Yeming Wen, Florian Wenzel, Kevin Murphy, D. Sculley, Balaji Lakshminarayanan, Jasper Snoek, Yarin Gal.
