Overview

Post-hoc calibration studies how to make a trained model’s confidence scores or predictive distributions reflect how often its predictions are correct. Common approaches include temperature scaling, Platt scaling, isotonic regression, and more flexible class-, input-, or group-conditional calibrators fitted on held-out data. Researchers evaluate these methods with measures such as expected calibration error, Brier score, and negative log-likelihood, across settings including classification, medical prediction, segmentation, forecasting, and language models. A central tension is that flexible calibration can address shifts, ambiguity, and local reliability differences, but may overfit small calibration sets or change predictions and rankings; reliable evaluation must account for the deployment setting and the labels used.

Latest papers

82 papers16 papers in the last four weeks, up 60% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

May 15, 2026

Isotonic Survival Regression: Calibrated Survival Distributions from Deep Cox Models

Time-to-event data is widespread across the life sciences and engineering, but it is typically encountered together with censoring, which complicates the application of standard machine learning methods. Deep Cox models have emerged as a popular method for analyzing time-to-event data because they gracefully handle censoring and can be used with unstructured data such as clinical text reports, genomic sequences, and pathology images. However, their predicted survival probabilities are often poorly calibrated, thus limiting their practical utility. In this paper, we propose a novel post hoc calibration method for Deep Cox models that uses isotonic regression to refine predicted survival probabilities without affecting discriminative power. We establish favorable theoretical guarantees, including a double-robustness property and asymptotic calibration. Experiments on synthetic and real-world clinical data demonstrate the empirical effectiveness of our method.
May 13, 2026

Discovery of Hidden Miscalibration Regimes

Calibration is commonly evaluated by comparing model confidence with its empirical correctness, implicitly treating reliability as a function of the confidence score alone. However, this view can hide substantial structure: models may be systematically overconfident on some kinds of inputs and underconfident on others, causing global reliability diagnostics to obscure localised calibration failures. To address this, we formulate the problem of discovering hidden miscalibration regimes without assuming access to predefined data slices. We define the corresponding miscalibration field and propose a diagnostic framework for estimating it. Our approach learns a calibration-aware representation of the input space and estimates signed local miscalibration by kernel smoothing in the learned geometry. Across four real-world LLM benchmarks and twelve LLMs, we find that input-dependent calibration heterogeneity is prevalent. We further show that the discovered fields are actionable: they support local confidence correction and reduce calibration error in systematically miscalibrated regions where confidence-based methods such as isotonic regression and temperature scaling are less effective.
May 11, 2026

VERDI: Single-Call Confidence Estimation for Verification-Based LLM Judges via Decomposed Inference

LLM-as-Judge systems are widely deployed for automated evaluation, yet practitioners lack reliable methods to know when a judge's verdict should be trusted. Token log-probabilities, the standard post-hoc confidence signal, are unavailable for many commercial LLMs and, even when accessible, saturate above 0.999 with structured JSON output. We introduce VERDI (VERification-Decomposed Inference), a method that extracts confidence from the reasoning trace a structured judge already produces, with no additional inference calls. VERDI decomposes each verification-style evaluation into sub-checks and derives three structural signals: Step-Verdict Alignment, Claim-Level Margin, and Evidence Grounding Score. We combine them with Platt-scaled logistic regression. On three public benchmarks, VERDI achieves AUROC 0.72-0.91 on GPT-4.1-mini and 0.66-0.80 on GPT-5.4-mini. On Qwen3.5-4B/9B/27B, where answer-token logprobs are anti-calibrated (higher confidence on errors, AUROC 0.32-0.49), VERDI achieves 0.56-0.70. We additionally validate on a production system with eight rubrics (AUROC 0.73-0.88 on factual rubrics), demonstrate cross-model transfer (AUROC 0.66-0.69), and show that a 33M-parameter NLI (Natural Language Inference) model provides a scalable alternative to regex extraction.
May 11, 2026

Unified Approach for Weakly Supervised Multicalibration

Multicalibration requires predicted scores to agree with label probabilities across rich families of subgroups and score-dependent tests, but existing methods require clean input-label pairs for evaluation and post-processing. This assumption fails in weakly supervised learning (WSL) regimes -- including positive-unlabeled, unlabeled-unlabeled, and positive-confidence learning -- where clean labels are costly or unavailable even though reliable uncertainty estimates may be crucial. We address this gap by developing estimators of multicalibration error and post-hoc correction methods for WSL settings in which clean input-label pairs are unavailable. We propose a unified framework for estimating and correcting multicalibration under weak supervision by combining contamination-matrix risk rewrites with witness-based calibration constraints, yielding corrected multicalibration moments with finite-sample guarantees. We further propose weak-label multicalibration boost (WLMC), a generic post-hoc recalibration algorithm under weak supervision. Finally, we conduct experiments across multiple weak-supervision settings to evaluate multicalibration behavior and offer empirical insight into uncertainty estimation under weak supervision.
May 11, 2026

Probing Routing-Conditional Calibration in Attention-Residual Transformers

Post-hoc calibration is usually evaluated as a function of logits or softmax confidence alone, even as routing-augmented architectures increasingly accompany predictions with sample-specific internal routing traces and pair them with claims of calibration-relevant uncertainty. We ask a basic question: do these traces provide stable routing-specific evidence for post-hoc calibration beyond confidence? We study this in Attention-Residual transformers (Kimi Team, 2026) through a matched-confidence diagnostic suite that stratifies examples by routing-derived state, compares subgroup gaps against within-bin routing-permutation nulls, and evaluates matched post-hoc probes differing only in their auxiliary feature. Across our completed AR runs, scalar routing summaries do not provide stable evidence of routing-conditional miscalibration: weighted gaps remain small or seed-sensitive, and only 11 of 3030 within-bin permutation tests rejects the conditional-null at α=0.05α=0.05 (only on one seed; not stable across seeds in that cell). AR-CondCal, a minimal 22-D Nadaraya--Watson probe on confidence and routing-depth variance, lies within the seed-variance band of matched confidence-only and predictive-entropy controls and does not reliably improve worst-routing-tertile ECE; bandwidth-sensitivity checks (Scott multiples, CV-NLL, global-ECE oracle) do not change this. A full-vector MLP over (c,H1,…,HL)(c, H_1, \ldots, H_L) can appear to improve over a linear confidence baseline, but the apparent gain disappears once a capacity-matched confidence-only MLP is included as a control, and shuffled routing profiles achieve comparable performance. Apparent routing-aware calibration gains in this AR setting should not be read as internal-state calibration until matched-confidence, bandwidth, capacity, and permutation controls rule out common confounds.
May 9, 2026

Two Ways to De-Bias an LLM-as-a-Judge: A Continuous-Score Comparison of Hierarchical Bayesian Calibration and Neural-ODE Score Transport

[Abridged] Using a Large Language Model (LLM) as an automatic rater (LLM-as-a-judge) is cheap but potentially biased: some judges run lenient, others strict, the middle of the scale gets compressed, and verbose answers may be over-rewarded. A common remedy is post-hoc calibration: leave the cheap judge in place and, on a modest set of paired anchors, fit a transformation from raw judge scores to an estimate of the human rating. We compare two correctors that take opposing views on how this mapping should be modeled: a parametric, small-anchor hierarchical Bayesian linear correction with per-score uncertainty, and a non-parametric Neural-ODE (FFJORD) score-transport flow. Both are run head-to-head on UltraFeedback fine-grained_score (1700 paired examples, 200 held out), with calibration split into three operational sub-questions: population-mean recovery, per-item accuracy, and distributional-shape match. The headline result is that the choice between methods is primarily a data-budget question. Both correctors close the raw +0.71+0.71-point mean offset to within ±0.08\pm 0.08 of the GPT-4 reference, at 100 and at 1500 anchors. Past that, the methods swap roles. With 100 anchors, the linear corrector reconstructs the human-score distribution roughly twice as well by KL divergence (0.031 vs. 0.058) and ties the flow on MAE. With 1500 anchors the flow wins on every metric (MAE 0.320 vs. 0.359, Pearson 0.922 vs. 0.896, KL 0.026 vs. 0.037). The Bayesian linear corrector saturates well below 1500 anchors: residual tanh⁡\tanh-shaped non-linearity is, by construction, structure a linear correction cannot fit. The flow keeps improving as labels grow. We translate these findings into an explicit decision rule for production deployments.
May 8, 2026

The Minimax Rate of Perturbed Second-Order Calibration

Second-order calibration error quantifies how closely a higher-order predictor's epistemic-uncertainty estimate matches the conditional variance of the label probability on its level sets. We characterize the minimax rate of estimating the second-order calibration error for binary classification in the regime where a small perturbation is applied to the classifier outputs. Our procedure is simple: add independent bandwidth-hh sech noise to the score coordinates, then regress Y(1)Y^{(1)} and Y(1)Y(2)Y^{(1)}Y^{(2)} on the perturbed score using low-degree polynomials. Crucially, the sech perturbation makes the calibration functions analytic in a suitable strip. The resulting estimator has error Oh(log⁡3/2n/n)O_h(\log^{3/2}n/\sqrt n), with explicit constants. In the same setting, a matching Ω(1/n)Ω(1/\sqrt{n}) lower bound establishes minimax optimality up to logarithmic factors. As a corollary, we give a finite-sample guarantee for perturbed second-order Platt scaling, yielding a post-hoc procedure that recalibrates both the mean prediction and the epistemic-variance estimate of the perturbed higher-order predictor. Along the way, we give an explicit two-moment formulation of second-order calibration error and relate it quantitatively to the bucketed formulation of Ahdritz et al. [2025]. Our experiments confirm the predicted rate and the quality of the recalibrated uncertainties.
May 5, 2026

The Manokhin Probability Matrix: A Diagnostic Framework for Classifier Probability Quality

The Brier score conflates two distinct properties of probabilistic predictions: reliability (calibration error) and resolution (discriminatory power). We introduce the Manokhin Probability Matrix, a BCG-style two-dimensional diagnostic framework that separates them. Classifiers are placed on a 2x2 grid by Spiegelhalter Z-statistic and AUC-ROC expected rank, then assigned to one of four archetypes: Eagle (good on both axes), Bull (strong discrimination, poor calibration), Sloth (well-calibrated, weak discriminator), and Mole (poor on both). Each archetype carries a distinct prescription. We populate the matrix from a large-scale empirical study spanning 21 classifiers, 5 post-hoc calibrators, and 30 real-world binary classification tasks from the TabArena-v0.1 suite. The assignment is unambiguous. CatBoost, TabICL, EBM, TabPFN, GBC, and Random Forest are Eagles. XGBoost, LightGBM, and HGB are Bulls; Venn-Abers calibration cuts log-loss by 6.5 to 12.6% on Bulls but degrades Eagles by 2.1%. SVM, LR, LDA, and the empirical base-rate predictor are Sloths. MLP, KNN, Naive Bayes, and ExtraTrees are Moles. A theoretical asymmetry follows: no order-preserving post-hoc calibrator can add discriminatory power (Proposition 1), so calibration is the fixable part and discrimination is the hard part. The practical rule is direct: do not optimise aggregate Brier score without first decomposing it; optimise discrimination first, then fix calibration post-hoc. Code and raw experimental data are available at https://github.com/valeman/classifier_calibration.
Apr 23, 2026

CHRep: Cross-modal Histology Representation and Post-hoc Calibration for Spatial Gene Expression Prediction

Spatial transcriptomics (ST) enables spatially resolved gene profiling but remains expensive and low-throughput, limiting large-cohort studies and routine clinical use. Predicting spatial gene expression from routine hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) slides is a promising alternative, yet under realistic leave-one-slide-out evaluation, existing models often suffer from slide-level appearance shifts and regression-driven over-smoothing that suppress biologically meaningful variation. CHRep is a two-phase framework for robust histology-to-expression prediction. In the training phase, CHRep learns a structure-aware representation by jointly optimizing correlation-aware regression, symmetric image-expression alignment, and coordinate-induced spatial topology regularization. In the inference phase, cross-slide robustness is improved without backbone fine-tuning through a lightweight calibration module trained on the training slides, which combines a non-parametric estimate from a training gallery with a magnitude-regularized correction module. Unlike prior embedding-alignment or retrieval-based transfer methods that rely on a single prediction route, CHRep couples topology-preserving representation learning with post-hoc calibration, enabling stable neighborhood retrieval and controlled bias correction under slide-level shifts. Across the three cohorts, CHRep consistently improves gene-wise correlation under leave-one-slide-out evaluation, with the largest gains observed on Alex+10x. Relative to HAGE, the Pearson correlation coefficient on all considered genes [PCC(ACG)] increases by 4.0% on cSCC and 9.8% on HER2+. Relative to mclSTExp, PCC(ACG) further improves by 39.5% on Alex+10x, together with 9.7% and 9.0% reductions in mean squared error (MSE) and mean absolute error (MAE), respectively.
Apr 23, 2026

Calibeating Prediction-Powered Inference

We study semisupervised mean estimation with a small labeled sample, a large unlabeled sample, and a black-box prediction model whose output may be miscalibrated. A standard approach in this setting is augmented inverse-probability weighting (AIPW) [Robins et al., 1994], which protects against prediction-model misspecification but can be inefficient when the prediction score is poorly aligned with the outcome scale. We introduce Calibrated Prediction-Powered Inference, which post-hoc calibrates the prediction score on the labeled sample before using it for semisupervised estimation. This simple step requires no retraining and can improve the original score both as a predictor of the outcome and as a regression adjustment for semisupervised inference. We study both linear and isotonic calibration. For isotonic calibration, we establish first-order optimality guarantees: isotonic post-processing can improve predictive accuracy and estimator efficiency relative to the original score and simpler post-processing rules, while no further post-processing of the fitted isotonic score yields additional first-order gains. For linear calibration, we show first-order equivalence to PPI++. We also clarify the relationship among existing estimators, showing that the original PPI estimator is a special case of AIPW and can be inefficient when the prediction model is accurate, while PPI++ is AIPW with empirical efficiency maximization [Rubin et al., 2008]. In simulations and real-data experiments, our calibrated estimators often outperform PPI and are competitive with, or outperform, AIPW and PPI++. We provide an accompanying Python package, ppi_aipw, at https://larsvanderlaan.github.io/ppi-aipw/.
Apr 21, 2026

Calibrating Scientific Foundation Models with Inference-Time Stochastic Attention

Transformer-based scientific foundation models are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings, but current architectures give deterministic outputs and provide limited support for calibrated predictive uncertainty. We propose Stochastic Attention, a sample average lightweight inference-time modification that randomizes attention by replacing softmax weights with normalized multinomial samples controlled by a single concentration parameter, and produces predictive ensembles without retraining. To set this parameter, we introduce a calibration objective that matches the stochastic attention output with the target, yielding an efficient univariate post-hoc tuning problem. We evaluate this mechanism on scientific foundation models for weather and time-series forecasting, as well as several regression tasks. Across benchmarks against uncertainty-aware baselines, we find that Sample Average Stochastic Attention achieves the strongest native calibration and the sharpest prediction intervals at comparable calibration, with adaptation costs nearly three orders of magnitude lower than the next-best baseline.
Apr 17, 2026

TwinTrack: Post-hoc Multi-Rater Calibration for Medical Image Segmentation

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) segmentation on contrast-enhanced CT is inherently ambiguous: inter-rater disagreement among experts reflects genuine uncertainty rather than annotation noise. Standard deep learning approaches assume a single ground truth, producing probabilistic outputs that can be poorly calibrated and difficult to interpret under such ambiguity. We present TwinTrack, a framework that addresses this gap through post-hoc calibration of ensemble segmentation probabilities to the empirical mean human response (MHR) -the fraction of expert annotators labeling a voxel as tumor. Calibrated probabilities are thus directly interpretable as the expected proportion of annotators assigning the tumor label, explicitly modeling inter-rater disagreement. The proposed post-hoc calibration procedure is simple and requires only a small multi-rater calibration set. It consistently improves calibration metrics over standard approaches when evaluated on the MICCAI 2025 CURVAS-PDACVI multi-rater benchmark.
Apr 5, 2026

Good Rankings, Wrong Probabilities: A Calibration Audit of Multimodal Cancer Survival Models

Multimodal deep learning models that fuse whole-slide histopathology images with genomic data have achieved strong discriminative performance for cancer survival prediction, as measured by the concordance index. Yet whether the survival probabilities derived from these models - either directly from native outputs or via standard post-hoc reconstruction - are calibrated remains largely unexamined. We conduct, to our knowledge, the first systematic fold-level 1-calibration audit of multimodal WSI-genomics survival architectures, evaluating native discrete-time survival outputs (Experiment A: 3 models on TCGA-BRCA) and Breslow-reconstructed survival curves from scalar risk scores (Experiment B: 11 architectures across 5 TCGA cancer types). In Experiment A, all three models fail 1-calibration on a majority of folds (12 of 15 fold-level tests reject after Benjamini-Hochberg correction). Across the full 290 fold-level tests, 166 reject the null of correct calibration at the median event time after Benjamini-Hochberg correction (FDR = 0.05). MCAT achieves C-index 0.817 on GBMLGG yet fails 1-calibration on all five folds. Gating-based fusion is associated with better calibration; bilinear and concatenation fusion are not. Post-hoc Platt scaling reduces miscalibration at the evaluated horizon (e.g., MCAT: 5/5 folds failing to 2/5) without affecting discrimination. The concordance index alone is insufficient for evaluating survival models intended for clinical use.
Mar 24, 2026

Confidence Calibration under Ambiguous Ground Truth

Confidence calibration assumes a unique ground-truth label per input, yet this assumption fails wherever annotators genuinely disagree. Post-hoc calibrators fitted on majority-voted labels, the standard single-label targets used in practice, can appear well-calibrated under conventional evaluation yet remain substantially miscalibrated against the underlying annotator distribution. We show that this failure is structural: under simplifying assumptions, Temperature Scaling is biased toward temperatures that underestimate annotator uncertainty, with true-label miscalibration increasing monotonically with annotation entropy. To address this, we develop a family of ambiguity-aware post-hoc calibrators that optimise proper scoring rules against the full label distribution and require no model retraining. Our methods span progressively weaker annotation requirements: Dirichlet-Soft leverages the full annotator distribution and achieves the best overall calibration quality across settings; Monte Carlo Temperature Scaling with a single annotation per example (MCTS S=1) matches full-distribution calibration across all benchmarks, demonstrating that pre-aggregated label distributions are unnecessary; and Label-Smooth Temperature Scaling (LS-TS) operates with voted labels alone by constructing data-driven pseudo-soft targets from the model's own confidence. Experiments on four benchmarks with real multi-annotator distributions (CIFAR-10H, ChaosNLI) and clinically-informed synthetic annotations (ISIC~2019, DermaMNIST) show that Dirichlet-Soft reduces true-label ECE by 55-87% relative to Temperature Scaling, while LS-TS reduces ECE by 9-77% without any annotator data.
Mar 12, 2026

Mitigating the Multiplicity Burden: The Role of Calibration in Reducing Predictive Multiplicity of Classifiers

As machine learning models are increasingly deployed in high-stakes environments, ensuring both probabilistic reliability and prediction stability has become critical. This paper examines the interplay between classification calibration and predictive multiplicity - the phenomenon in which multiple near-optimal models within the Rashomon set yield conflicting credit outcomes for the same applicant. Using nine diverse credit risk benchmark datasets, we investigate whether predictive multiplicity concentrates in regions of low predictive confidence and how post-hoc calibration can mitigate algorithmic arbitrariness. Our empirical analysis reveals that minority class observations bear a disproportionate multiplicity burden, as confirmed by significant disparities in predictive multiplicity and prediction confidence. Furthermore, our empirical comparisons indicate that applying post-hoc calibration methods - specifically Platt Scaling, Isotonic Regression, and Temperature Scaling - is associated with lower obscurity across the Rashomon set. Among the tested techniques, Platt Scaling and Isotonic Regression provide the most robust reduction in predictive multiplicity. These findings suggest that calibration can function as a consensus-enforcing layer and may support procedural fairness by mitigating predictive multiplicity.
Mar 9, 2026

Slumbering to Precision: Enhancing Artificial Neural Network Calibration Through Sleep-like Processes

Artificial neural networks are often overconfident, undermining trust because their predicted probabilities do not match actual accuracy. Inspired by biological sleep and the role of spontaneous replay in memory and learning, we introduce Sleep Replay Consolidation (SRC), a novel calibration approach. SRC is a post-training, sleep-like phase that selectively replays internal representations to update network weights and improve calibration without supervised retraining. Across multiple experiments, SRC is competitive with and complementary to standard approaches such as temperature scaling. Combining SRC with temperature scaling achieves the best Brier score and entropy trade-offs for AlexNet and VGG19. These results show that SRC provides a fundamentally novel approach to improving neural network calibration. SRC-based calibration offers a practical path toward more trustworthy confidence estimates and narrows the gap between human-like uncertainty handling and modern deep networks.
Feb 27, 2026

V-ECE: Estimating General Expected Calibration Errors

In probabilistic classification, calibration error (CE) measures the average divergence of predicted probabilities f(X)f(X) from P(Y∣f(X))\mathbb{P}(Y|f(X)), the true class distribution for that predicted probability. While being a useful diagnostic tool, it is hard to estimate: popular binning-based estimators are often inconsistent and scale poorly beyond two classes. Recent work rewrites the CE as the excess risk of a model compared to the best recalibration of its own predictions, measured with a proper loss. However, this only works for Bregman-divergence-based calibration errors like the squared error, excluding the more popular L1L_1-distance-based CE. We show that using prediction-dependent proper scores can alleviate this restriction, allowing us to estimate CEs with general convex divergences, including LpL_p distances with closed-form losses in the binary and multiclass settings. To estimate the excess risk, we introduce a more accurate recalibrator that fits a residual to temperature scaling with gradient boosting. The resulting variational estimator, V-ECE, needs no bins or clusters and lower-bounds the true calibration error in expectation. On a benchmark of semi-synthetic tasks built from real classifiers, with known true CE, V-ECE is among the most accurate binary estimators for every calibration error and significantly outperforms all multiclass estimators. Our results are accompanied by additional theory on LpL_p CE, estimator bias, and over- or under-confidence estimation.
Feb 26, 2026

Operationalizing Fairness: Post-Hoc Threshold Optimization Under Hard Resource Limits

The deployment of machine learning in high-stakes domains requires a balance between predictive safety and algorithmic fairness. However, existing fairness interventions often as- sume unconstrained resources and employ group-specific decision thresholds that violate anti- discrimination regulations. We introduce a post-hoc, model-agnostic threshold optimization framework that jointly balances safety, efficiency, and equity under strict and hard capacity constraints. To ensure legal compliance, the framework enforces a single, global decision thresh- old. We formulated a parameterized ethical loss function coupled with a bounded decision rule that mathematically prevents intervention volumes from exceeding the available resources. An- alytically, we prove the key properties of the deployed threshold, including local monotonicity with respect to ethical weighting and the formal identification of critical capacity regimes. We conducted extensive experimental evaluations on diverse high-stakes datasets. The principal re- sults demonstrate that capacity constraints dominate ethical priorities; the strict resource limit determines the final deployed threshold in over 80% of the tested configurations. Furthermore, under a restrictive 25% capacity limit, the proposed framework successfully maintains high risk identification (recall ranging from 0.409 to 0.702), whereas standard unconstrained fairness heuristics collapse to a near-zero utility. We conclude that theoretical fairness objectives must be explicitly subordinated to operational capacity limits to remain in deployment. By decou- pling predictive scoring from policy evaluation and strictly bounding intervention rates, this framework provides a practical and legally compliant mechanism for stakeholders to navigate unavoidable ethical trade-offs in resource-constrained environments.
Feb 23, 2026

JUCAL: Jointly Calibrating Aleatoric and Epistemic Uncertainty in Classification Tasks

We study post-calibration uncertainty for trained ensembles of classifiers. Specifically, we consider both aleatoric (label noise) and epistemic (model) uncertainty. Among the most popular and widely used calibration methods in classification are temperature scaling (i.e., pool-then-calibrate) and conformal methods. However, the main shortcoming of these calibration methods is that they do not balance the proportion of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty. Not balancing these uncertainties can severely misrepresent predictive uncertainty, leading to overconfident predictions in some input regions while being underconfident in others. To address this shortcoming, we present a simple but powerful calibration algorithm Joint Uncertainty Calibration (JUCAL) that jointly calibrates aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty. JUCAL jointly calibrates two constants to weight and scale epistemic and aleatoric uncertainties by optimizing the negative log-likelihood (NLL) on the validation/calibration dataset. JUCAL can be applied to any trained ensemble of classifiers (e.g., transformers, CNNs, or tree-based methods), with minimal computational overhead, without requiring access to the models' internal parameters. We experimentally evaluate JUCAL on various text classification tasks, for ensembles of varying sizes and with different ensembling strategies. Our experiments show that JUCAL significantly outperforms SOTA calibration methods across all considered classification tasks, reducing NLL and predictive set size by up to 15% and 20%, respectively. Interestingly, even applying JUCAL to an ensemble of size 5 can outperform temperature-scaled ensembles of size up to 50 in terms of NLL and predictive set size, resulting in up to 10 times smaller inference costs. Thus, we propose JUCAL as a new go-to method for calibrating ensembles in classification.
Feb 20, 2026

Multiclass Calibration Assessment and Recalibration of Probability Predictions via the Linear Log Odds Calibration Function

Machine-generated probability predictions are essential in modern classification tasks such as image classification. A model is well calibrated when its predicted probabilities correspond to observed event frequencies. Despite the need for multicategory recalibration methods, existing methods are limited to (i) comparing calibration between two or more models rather than directly assessing the calibration of a single model, (ii) requiring under-the-hood model access, e.g., accessing logit-scale predictions within the layers of a neural network, and (iii) providing output which is difficult for human analysts to understand. To overcome (i)-(iii), we propose Multicategory Linear Log Odds (MCLLO) recalibration, which (i) includes a likelihood ratio hypothesis test to assess calibration, (ii) does not require under-the-hood access to models and is thus applicable on a wide range of classification problems, and (iii) can be easily interpreted. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the MCLLO method through simulations and three real-world case studies involving image classification via convolutional neural network, obesity analysis via random forest, and ecology via regression modeling. We compare MCLLO to four comparator recalibration techniques utilizing both our hypothesis test and the existing calibration metric Expected Calibration Error to show that our method works well alone and in concert with other methods.
Feb 12, 2026

Confidence-Uncertainty Boundary Calibration for Bayesian Deep Learning in Medical Image Analysis

In critical decision support systems based on medical imaging, the reliability of AI-assisted decision-making is as relevant as predictive accuracy. Although deep learning models have demonstrated significant accuracy, they frequently suffer from miscalibration, manifested as overconfidence in erroneous predictions. To facilitate clinical acceptance, it is imperative that models quantify uncertainty in a manner that correlates with prediction correctness, allowing clinicians to identify unreliable outputs for further review. To address this necessity, this paper proposes a probabilistic optimization framework grounded in Bayesian deep learning. Specifically, the Confidence-Uncertainty Boundary Curve (CUBC) is first explored as an intermediate operational target. Grounded in this target, a novel Confidence-Uncertainty Boundary Loss (CUB-Loss) is proposed to regularize the alignment between prediction confidence and uncertainty estimates during training, imposing penalties on high-certainty errors and low-certainty correct predictions. Upon completion of training optimization, a Boundary Curve Calibration Error (BCCE) metric is further introduced to measure the degree of boundary alignment in the calibrated model. Building on this measurement, a Dual Temperature Scaling (DTS) strategy is devised to perform post-hoc refinement, further adjusting the posterior predictive distribution across different confidence-uncertainty regions. The proposed framework is validated on three distinct medical imaging tasks: automatic screening of pneumonia, diabetic retinopathy detection, and identification of skin lesions. Empirical results demonstrate that the proposed approach improves uncertainty calibration across diverse modalities, maintains robust performance in data-scarce scenarios, and remains effective on severely imbalanced datasets, underscoring its potential for real clinical deployment.
May 21, 2025

Adaptive Cumulative Mass Calibration with Conformal Prediction

Reliable probability estimates by classifiers are essential in high-risk applications. In practice, however, predicted probabilities are often miscalibrated, and many existing post-hoc calibration methods typically lack guarantees that a specific notion of calibration is achieved after the correction procedure is applied. We introduce a set-based perspective on calibration through the notion of cumulative mass calibration and the corresponding error measures. We propose a new calibration procedure based on conformal prediction that forms cumulative probabilities with guaranteed marginal coverage. We introduce an adaptive temperature scaling algorithm, with the temperature tuned for each input to satisfy the conformal coverage constraint. As we show, this procedure can be efficiently implemented. Across image classification tasks, particularly in settings with many classes, our method improves newly introduced calibration error measures (CMCE and αα-CMCE) and standard metrics (such as ECE, cw-ECE, MCE) over the existing baselines.