# A Critical Synthesis of Uncertainty Quantification and Foundation Models in Monocular Depth Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.08188 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08188/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 76 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Jan 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [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)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04977/) (2017)
- [Towards Robust Monocular Depth Estimation: Mixing Datasets for Zero-shot Cross-dataset Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01341/) (2019)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [Depth Map Prediction from a Single Image using a Multi-Scale Deep Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2283/) (2014)
- [MegaDepth: Learning Single-View Depth Prediction from Internet Photos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00607/) (2018)
- [Deep Ordinal Regression Network for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02446/) (2018)
- [A Survey of Uncertainty in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03342/) (2021)
- [Deep Ensembles: A Loss Landscape Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02757/) (2019)
- [Training Confidence-calibrated Classifiers for Detecting Out-of-Distribution Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09325/) (2017)
- [Simple and Principled Uncertainty Estimation with Deterministic Deep Learning via Distance Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10108/) (2020)
- [Metric3D: Towards Zero-shot Metric 3D Prediction from A Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10984/) (2023)
- [Omnidata: A Scalable Pipeline for Making Multi-Task Mid-Level Vision Datasets from 3D Scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04994/) (2021)
- [Learning to Recover 3D Scene Shape from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09365/) (2020)
- [Deep Deterministic Uncertainty: A Simple Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11582/) (2021)
- [BOP Challenge 2020 on 6D Object Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07378/) (2020)
- [On the uncertainty of self-supervised monocular depth estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.06209/) (2020)
- [Single-Image Depth Perception in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03901/) (2016)
- [Understanding Measures of Uncertainty for Adversarial Example Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08533/) (2018)
- [BinsFormer: Revisiting Adaptive Bins for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00987/) (2022)
- [DDP: Diffusion Model for Dense Visual Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17559/) (2023)
- [Transformer-Based Attention Networks for Continuous Pixel-Wise Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12091/) (2021)
- [A General Framework for Uncertainty Estimation in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06890/) (2019)
- [The Surprising Effectiveness of Diffusion Models for Optical Flow and Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01923/) (2023)
- [RealmDreamer: Text-Driven 3D Scene Generation with Inpainting and Depth Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07199/) (2024)
- [Towards Zero-Shot Scale-Aware Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17253/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Rethinking Semi-supervised Segmentation Beyond Accuracy: Reliability and Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05917/) (2025)
- [TPA: Temporal Prompt Alignment for Fetal Congenital Heart Defect Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15298/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While recent foundation models have enabled significant breakthroughs in monocular depth estimation, a clear path towards safe and reliable deployment in the real-world remains elusive. Metric depth estimation, which involves predicting absolute distances, poses particular challenges, as even the most advanced foundation models remain prone to critical errors. Since quantifying the uncertainty has emerged as a promising endeavor to address these limitations and enable trustworthy deployment, we fuse five different uncertainty quantification methods with the current state-of-the-art DepthAnythingV2 foundation model. To cover a wide range of metric depth domains, we evaluate their performance on four diverse datasets. Our findings identify fine-tuning with the Gaussian Negative Log-Likelihood Loss (GNLL) as a particularly promising approach, offering reliable uncertainty estimates while maintaining predictive performance and computational efficiency on par with the baseline, encompassing both training and inference time. By fusing uncertainty quantification and foundation models within the context of monocular depth estimation, this paper lays a critical foundation for future research aimed at improving not only model performance but also its explainability. Extending this critical synthesis of uncertainty quantification and foundation models into other crucial tasks, such as semantic segmentation and pose estimation, presents exciting opportunities for safer and more reliable machine vision systems.