# Estimating Predictive Uncertainty Under Program Data Distribution Shift

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.10989 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10989/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jul 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [Simple and Scalable Predictive Uncertainty Estimation using Deep Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01474/) (2016)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [A Baseline for Detecting Misclassified and Out-of-Distribution Examples in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02136/) (2016)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [Adversarial examples in the physical world](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.02533/) (2016)
- [Concrete Problems in AI Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06565/) (2016)
- [A Simple Unified Framework for Detecting Out-of-Distribution Samples and Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03888/) (2018)
- [Enhancing The Reliability of Out-of-distribution Image Detection in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02690/) (2017)
- [DeepFool: a simple and accurate method to fool deep neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04599/) (2015)
- [Can You Trust Your Model's Uncertainty? Evaluating Predictive Uncertainty Under Dataset Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02530/) (2019)
- [AugMix: A Simple Data Processing Method to Improve Robustness and Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02781/) (2019)
- [The Limitations of Deep Learning in Adversarial Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07528/) (2015)
- [Reluplex: An Efficient SMT Solver for Verifying Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.01135/) (2017)
- [A Simple Baseline for Bayesian Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.02476/) (2019)
- [Weight Uncertainty in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05424/) (2015)
- [Variational Dropout and the Local Reparameterization Trick](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02557/) (2015)
- [Likelihood Ratios for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02845/) (2019)
- [Invertible Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00995/) (2018)
- [Probabilistic Backpropagation for Scalable Learning of Bayesian Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.05336/) (2015)
- [Pretrained Transformers Improve Out-of-Distribution Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06100/) (2020)
- [DeepTest: Automated Testing of Deep-Neural-Network-driven Autonomous Cars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.08559/) (2017)
- [code2vec: Learning Distributed Representations of Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.09473/) (2018)
- [A Convolutional Attention Network for Extreme Summarization of Source Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.03001/) (2016)
- [Quantifying Uncertainties in Natural Language Processing Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07253/) (2018)
- [word2vec Parameter Learning Explained](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.2738/) (2014)
- [Adversarial Sample Detection for Deep Neural Network through Model Mutation Testing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05793/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Exploring Distributional Shifts in Large Language Models for Code Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09128/) (2023)
- [CodeS: Towards Code Model Generalization Under Distribution Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05480/) (2022)
- [LeMix: Unified Scheduling for LLM Training and Inference on Multi-GPU Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21276/) (2025)
- [MACE: A Hybrid LLM Serving System with Colocated SLO-aware Continuous Retraining Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03283/) (2025)
- [Characterizing Overconfident Failure in LLM-Based Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.11300/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep learning (DL) techniques have achieved great success in predictive accuracy in a variety of tasks, but deep neural networks (DNNs) are shown to produce highly overconfident scores for even abnormal samples. Well-defined uncertainty indicates whether a model's output should (or should not) be trusted and thus becomes critical in real-world scenarios which typically involves shifted input distributions due to many factors. Existing uncertainty approaches assume that testing samples from a different data distribution would induce unreliable model predictions thus have higher uncertainty scores. They quantify model uncertainty by calibrating DL model's confidence of a given input and evaluate the effectiveness in computer vision (CV) and natural language processing (NLP)-related tasks. However, their methodologies' reliability may be compromised under programming tasks due to difference in data representations and shift patterns. In this paper, we first define three different types of distribution shift in program data and build a large-scale shifted Java dataset. We implement two common programming language tasks on our dataset to study the effect of each distribution shift on DL model performance. We also propose a large-scale benchmark of existing state-of-the-art predictive uncertainty on programming tasks and investigate their effectiveness under data distribution shift. Experiments show that program distribution shift does degrade the DL model performance to varying degrees and that existing uncertainty methods all present certain limitations in quantifying uncertainty on program dataset.