On the Pitfall of Mixup for Uncertainty Calibration

Deng-Bao Wang, Lanqing Li, Peilin Zhao, Pheng-Ann Heng, Min-Ling Zhang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023, pp. 7609-7618

By simply taking convex combinations between pairs of samples and their labels, mixup training has been shown to easily improve predictive accuracy. It has been recently found that models trained with mixup also perform well on uncertainty calibration. However, in this study, we found that mixup training usually makes models less calibratable than vanilla empirical risk minimization, which means that it would harm uncertainty estimation when post-hoc calibration is considered. By decomposing the mixup process into data transformation and random perturbation, we suggest that the confidence penalty nature of the data transformation is the reason of calibration degradation. To mitigate this problem, we first investigate the mixup inference strategy and found that despite it improves calibration on mixup, this ensemble-like strategy does not necessarily outperform simple ensemble. Then, we propose a general strategy named mixup inference in training, which adopts a simple decoupling principle for recovering the outputs of raw samples at the end of forward network pass. By embedding the mixup inference, models can be learned from the original one-hot labels and hence avoid the negative impact of confidence penalty. Our experiments show this strategy properly solves mixup's calibration issue without sacrificing the predictive performance, while even improves accuracy than vanilla mixup.