# Uncertainty-Aware Remaining Lifespan Prediction from Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13430 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13430/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [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)
- [CoAtNet: Marrying Convolution and Attention for All Data Sizes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04803/) (2021)
- [On the Pitfalls of Heteroscedastic Uncertainty Estimation with Probabilistic Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09168/) (2022)
- [Faithful Heteroscedastic Regression with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09184/) (2022)
- [Unveil Benign Overfitting for Transformer in Vision: Training Dynamics, Convergence, and Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19345/) (2024)
- [Learning Expectation of Label Distribution for Facial Age and Attractiveness Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01771/) (2020)
- [MetaAge: Meta-Learning Personalized Age Estimators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05288/) (2022)
- [Estimating Remaining Lifespan from the Face](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08229/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Predicting mortality-related outcomes from images offers the prospect of accessible, noninvasive, and scalable health screening. We present a method that leverages pretrained vision transformer foundation models to estimate remaining lifespan from facial and whole-body images, alongside robust uncertainty quantification. We show that predictive uncertainty varies systematically with the true remaining lifespan, and that this uncertainty can be effectively modeled by learning a Gaussian distribution for each sample. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art mean absolute error (MAE) of 7.41 years on an established dataset, and further achieves 4.91 and 4.99 years MAE on two new, higher-quality datasets curated and published in this work. Importantly, our models provide calibrated uncertainty estimates, as demonstrated by a bucketed expected calibration error of 0.82 years on the Faces Dataset. While not intended for clinical deployment, these results highlight the potential of extracting medically relevant signals from images. We make all code and datasets available to facilitate further research.