# Sample Margin-Aware Recalibration of Temperature Scaling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23492 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23492/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [Learning Robust Global Representations by Penalizing Local Predictive Power](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13549/) (2019)
- [When Does Label Smoothing Help?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02629/) (2019)
- [AugMix: A Simple Data Processing Method to Improve Robustness and Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02781/) (2019)
- [Large-Scale Long-Tailed Recognition in an Open World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05160/) (2019)
- [Measuring Calibration in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01685/) (2019)
- [Beyond temperature scaling: Obtaining well-calibrated multiclass probabilities with Dirichlet calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12656/) (2019)
- [Calibrating Deep Neural Networks using Focal Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.09437/) (2020)
- [Verified Uncertainty Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10155/) (2019)
- [On Mixup Training: Improved Calibration and Predictive Uncertainty for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11001/) (2019)
- [Mitigating Neural Network Overconfidence with Logit Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09310/) (2022)
- [Mix-n-Match: Ensemble and Compositional Methods for Uncertainty Calibration in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07329/) (2020)
- [Improving model calibration with accuracy versus uncertainty optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07923/) (2020)
- [Mitigating Bias in Calibration Error Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08668/) (2020)
- [Calibration of Neural Networks using Splines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.12800/) (2020)
- [Local Temperature Scaling for Probability Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05105/) (2020)
- [Soft Calibration Objectives for Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00106/) (2021)
- [Intra Order-preserving Functions for Calibration of Multi-Class Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06820/) (2020)
- [Better Uncertainty Calibration via Proper Scores for Classification and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.07835/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Post-Calibration Reliability Reranking of Relevance Decisions via Label-wise Monotone Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.10406/) (2026)
- [Quantifying and Improving Adaptivity in Conformal Prediction through Input Transformations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11472/) (2025)
- [Signal-Routed Temperature Scaling: Low-Capacity Risk-Conditioned Calibration for Small Validation Budgets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.38936/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advances in deep learning have significantly improved predictive accuracy. However, modern neural networks remain systematically overconfident, posing risks for deployment in safety-critical scenarios. Current post-hoc calibration methods face a fundamental dilemma: global approaches like Temperature Scaling apply uniform adjustments across all samples, introducing high bias despite computational efficiency, while more expressive methods that operate on full logit distributions suffer from high variance due to noisy high-dimensional inputs and insufficient validation data. To address these challenges, we propose Sample Margin-Aware Recalibration of Temperature (SMART), a lightweight, data-efficient recalibration method that precisely scales logits based on the margin between the top two logits -- termed the logit gap. Specifically, the logit gap serves as a denoised, scalar signal directly tied to decision boundary uncertainty, providing a robust indicator that avoids the noise inherent in high-dimensional logit spaces while preserving model prediction invariance. Meanwhile, SMART employs a novel soft-binned Expected Calibration Error (SoftECE) objective that balances model bias and variance through adaptive binning, enabling stable parameter updates even with extremely limited calibration data. Extensive evaluations across diverse datasets and architectures demonstrate that SMART achieves state-of-the-art calibration performance even with substantially fewer parameters compared to existing parametric methods, offering a principled, robust, and highly efficient solution for practical uncertainty quantification in neural network predictions. The source code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SMART-8B11.