Sparsity increases uncertainty estimation in deep ensemble

Abstract

Deep neural networks have achieved almost human-level results in various tasks and have become popular in the broad artificial intelligence domains. Uncertainty estimation is an on-demand task caused by the black-box point estimation behavior of deep learning. The deep ensemble provides increased accuracy and estimated uncertainty; however, linearly increasing the size makes the deep ensemble unfeasible for memory-intensive tasks. To address this problem, we used model pruning and quantization with a deep ensemble and analyzed the effect in the context of uncertainty metrics. We empirically showed that the ensemble members’ disagreement increases with pruning, making models sparser by zeroing irrelevant parameters. Increased disagreement im-plies increased uncertainty, which helps in making more robust predictions. Accordingly, an energy-efficient compressed deep ensemble is appropriate for memory-intensive and uncertainty-aware tasks.