# PaRCE: Probabilistic and Reconstruction-based Competency Estimation for CNN-based Image Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.16715 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16715/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [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)
- [Variational Inference with Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05770/) (2015)
- [Glow: Generative Flow with Invertible 1x1 Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03039/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Energy-based Out-of-distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03759/) (2020)
- [Can You Trust Your Model's Uncertainty? Evaluating Predictive Uncertainty Under Dataset Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02530/) (2019)
- [Generalized Out-of-Distribution Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11334/) (2021)
- [Deep Neural Networks are Easily Fooled: High Confidence Predictions for Unrecognizable Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.1897/) (2014)
- [Towards Total Recall in Industrial Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08265/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Uncertainty in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03342/) (2021)
- [Out-of-Distribution Detection with Deep Nearest Neighbors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06507/) (2022)
- [PaDiM: a Patch Distribution Modeling Framework for Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08785/) (2020)
- [Memorizing Normality to Detect Anomaly: Memory-augmented Deep Autoencoder for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02639/) (2019)
- [Towards Open Set Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06233/) (2015)
- [CutPaste: Self-Supervised Learning for Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04015/) (2021)
- [DRAEM -- A discriminatively trained reconstruction embedding for surface anomaly detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07610/) (2021)
- [Scaling Out-of-Distribution Detection for Real-World Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11132/) (2019)
- [Likelihood Ratios for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02845/) (2019)
- [Anomaly Detection via Reverse Distillation from One-Class Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10703/) (2022)
- [GANomaly: Semi-Supervised Anomaly Detection via Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06725/) (2018)
- [Improving Unsupervised Defect Segmentation by Applying Structural Similarity to Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02011/) (2018)
- [SimpleNet: A Simple Network for Image Anomaly Detection and Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15140/) (2023)
- [FastFlow: Unsupervised Anomaly Detection and Localization via 2D Normalizing Flows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07677/) (2021)
- [Adversarially Learned One-Class Classifier for Novelty Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.09088/) (2018)
- [DICE: Leveraging Sparsification for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09805/) (2021)
- [Student-Teacher Feature Pyramid Matching for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04257/) (2021)
- [Anomalib: A Deep Learning Library for Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08341/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Explaining Low Perception Model Competency with High-Competency Counterfactuals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05254/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are extremely popular and effective for image classification tasks but tend to be overly confident in their predictions. Various works have sought to quantify uncertainty associated with these models, detect out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs, or identify anomalous regions in an image, but limited work has sought to develop a holistic approach that can accurately estimate perception model confidence across various sources of uncertainty. We develop a probabilistic and reconstruction-based competency estimation (PaRCE) method and compare it to existing approaches for uncertainty quantification and OOD detection. We find that our method can best distinguish between correctly classified, misclassified, and OOD samples with anomalous regions, as well as between samples with visual image modifications resulting in high, medium, and low prediction accuracy. We describe how to extend our approach for anomaly localization tasks and demonstrate the ability of our approach to distinguish between regions in an image that are familiar to the perception model from those that are unfamiliar. We find that our method generates interpretable scores that most reliably capture a holistic notion of perception model confidence.