# Deep Probabilistic Supervision for Image Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24162 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24162/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in General knowledge distillation methods, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 38 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Dec 2025.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [General knowledge distillation methods](https://mlsanity.com/distill/general-knowledge-distillation-methods/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [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)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [Identity Mappings in Deep Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.05027/) (2016)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [Random Erasing Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04896/) (2017)
- [Temporal Ensembling for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02242/) (2016)
- [When Does Label Smoothing Help?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02629/) (2019)
- [Deep Double Descent: Where Bigger Models and More Data Hurt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02292/) (2019)
- [Born Again Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04770/) (2018)
- [Symmetric Cross Entropy for Robust Learning with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06112/) (2019)
- [Be Your Own Teacher: Improve the Performance of Convolutional Neural Networks via Self Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08094/) (2019)
- [Stochastic Gradient Descent as Approximate Bayesian Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04289/) (2017)
- [Joint Optimization Framework for Learning with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11364/) (2018)
- [TrivialAugment: Tuning-free Yet State-of-the-Art Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10158/) (2021)
- [Knowledge Distillation by On-the-Fly Native Ensemble](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.04606/) (2018)
- [Regularizing Class-wise Predictions via Self-knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13964/) (2020)
- [Confidence-Aware Learning for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01458/) (2020)
- [Self-Knowledge Distillation with Progressive Refinement of Targets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.12000/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Supervised training of deep neural networks for classification typically relies on hard targets, which promote overconfidence and can limit calibration, generalization, and robustness. Self-distillation methods aim to mitigate this by leveraging inter-class and sample-specific information present in the model's own predictions, but often remain dependent on hard targets without explicitly modeling predictive uncertainty. With this in mind, we propose Deep Probabilistic Supervision (DPS), a principled learning framework constructing sample-specific target distributions via statistical inference on the model's own predictions, remaining independent of hard targets after initialization. We show that DPS consistently yields higher test accuracy (e.g., +2.0% for DenseNet-264 on ImageNet) and significantly lower Expected Calibration Error (ECE) (-40% ResNet-50, CIFAR-100) than existing self-distillation methods. When combined with a contrastive loss, DPS achieves state-of-the-art robustness under label noise.