Multivariate Uncertainty in Deep Learning
This addresses safety and reliability issues in autonomous vehicles and robotics by enabling more accurate uncertainty estimation for deep learning models, though it is incremental as it builds on existing uncertainty quantification methods.
The paper tackled the problem of inaccurate uncertainty quantification in deep learning for state estimation, showing that modeling multivariate uncertainty improves Kalman filter performance in visual tracking and visual odometry tasks, with significant gains in both in-domain and out-of-domain evaluations.
Deep learning has the potential to dramatically impact navigation and tracking state estimation problems critical to autonomous vehicles and robotics. Measurement uncertainties in state estimation systems based on Kalman and other Bayes filters are typically assumed to be a fixed covariance matrix. This assumption is risky, particularly for "black box" deep learning models, in which uncertainty can vary dramatically and unexpectedly. Accurate quantification of multivariate uncertainty will allow for the full potential of deep learning to be used more safely and reliably in these applications. We show how to model multivariate uncertainty for regression problems with neural networks, incorporating both aleatoric and epistemic sources of heteroscedastic uncertainty. We train a deep uncertainty covariance matrix model in two ways: directly using a multivariate Gaussian density loss function, and indirectly using end-to-end training through a Kalman filter. We experimentally show in a visual tracking problem the large impact that accurate multivariate uncertainty quantification can have on Kalman filter performance for both in-domain and out-of-domain evaluation data. We additionally show in a challenging visual odometry problem how end-to-end filter training can allow uncertainty predictions to compensate for filter weaknesses.