# Weakly-Supervised Residual Evidential Learning for Multi-Instance Uncertainty Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.04405 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04405/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 62 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [Fashion-MNIST: a Novel Image Dataset for Benchmarking Machine Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07747/) (2017)
- [Simple and Scalable Predictive Uncertainty Estimation using Deep Ensembles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01474/) (2016)
- [What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04977/) (2017)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [Attention-based Deep Multiple Instance Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04712/) (2018)
- [Deep Neural Networks are Easily Fooled: High Confidence Predictions for Unrecognizable Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.1897/) (2014)
- [Data Efficient and Weakly Supervised Computational Pathology on Whole Slide Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09666/) (2020)
- [Evidential Deep Learning to Quantify Classification Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01768/) (2018)
- [Real-world Anomaly Detection in Surveillance Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04264/) (2018)
- [Predictive Uncertainty Estimation via Prior Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10501/) (2018)
- [Dual-stream Multiple Instance Learning Network for Whole Slide Image Classification with Self-supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08939/) (2020)
- [Deep Learning for Classical Japanese Literature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01718/) (2018)
- [Simple and Principled Uncertainty Estimation with Deterministic Deep Learning via Distance Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10108/) (2020)
- [Weakly-supervised Video Anomaly Detection with Robust Temporal Feature Magnitude Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10030/) (2021)
- [Deep Deterministic Uncertainty: A Simple Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11582/) (2021)
- [Quantifying the effects of data augmentation and stain color normalization in convolutional neural networks for computational pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.06543/) (2019)
- [Graph Convolutional Label Noise Cleaner: Train a Plug-and-play Action Classifier for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07256/) (2019)
- [Posterior Network: Uncertainty Estimation without OOD Samples via Density-Based Pseudo-Counts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09239/) (2020)
- [A General Framework for Uncertainty Estimation in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06890/) (2019)
- [Prior and Posterior Networks: A Survey on Evidential Deep Learning Methods For Uncertainty Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03051/) (2021)
- [On the Practicality of Deterministic Epistemic Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00649/) (2021)
- [Uncertainty Estimation by Fisher Information-based Evidential Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02045/) (2023)
- [Task-specific Fine-tuning via Variational Information Bottleneck for Weakly-supervised Pathology Whole Slide Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08446/) (2023)
- [Bi-directional Weakly Supervised Knowledge Distillation for Whole Slide Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03664/) (2022)
- [Uncertainty in the Variational Information Bottleneck](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00906/) (2018)
- [Learn to Accumulate Evidence from All Training Samples: Theory and Practice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11113/) (2023)
- [Open Set Action Recognition via Multi-Label Evidential Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12698/) (2023)
- [MUAD: Multiple Uncertainties for Autonomous Driving, a benchmark for multiple uncertainty types and tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01437/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [A Comprehensive Survey on Evidential Deep Learning and Its Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04720/) (2024)
- [Interpretable Vision-Language Survival Analysis with Ordinal Inductive Bias for Computational Pathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09369/) (2024)
- [Uncertainty Quantification for Machine Learning in Healthcare: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02874/) (2025)
- [Continual Multiple Instance Learning with Enhanced Localization for Histopathological Whole Slide Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02395/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Uncertainty estimation (UE), as an effective means of quantifying predictive uncertainty, is crucial for safe and reliable decision-making, especially in high-risk scenarios. Existing UE schemes usually assume that there are completely-labeled samples to support fully-supervised learning. In practice, however, many UE tasks often have no sufficiently-labeled data to use, such as the Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) with only weak instance annotations. To bridge this gap, this paper, for the first time, addresses the weakly-supervised issue of Multi-Instance UE (MIUE) and proposes a new baseline scheme, Multi-Instance Residual Evidential Learning (MIREL). Particularly, at the fine-grained instance UE with only weak supervision, we derive a multi-instance residual operator through the Fundamental Theorem of Symmetric Functions. On this operator derivation, we further propose MIREL to jointly model the high-order predictive distribution at bag and instance levels for MIUE. Extensive experiments empirically demonstrate that our MIREL not only could often make existing MIL networks perform better in MIUE, but also could surpass representative UE methods by large margins, especially in instance-level UE tasks. Our source code is available at https://github.com/liupei101/MIREL.