# Disentangling Model and Human Data Uncertainty in Apparent Facial Age Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.16378 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.16378/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [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)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- ["Why Should I Trust You?": Explaining the Predictions of Any Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04938/) (2016)
- [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)
- [What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04977/) (2017)
- [Aleatoric and Epistemic Uncertainty in Machine Learning: An Introduction to Concepts and Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09457/) (2019)
- [A Survey of Uncertainty in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03342/) (2021)
- [Weight Uncertainty in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05424/) (2015)
- [Age Progression/Regression by Conditional Adversarial Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08423/) (2017)
- [Flipout: Efficient Pseudo-Independent Weight Perturbations on Mini-Batches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04386/) (2018)
- [Quantifying Aleatoric and Epistemic Uncertainty in Machine Learning: Are Conditional Entropy and Mutual Information Appropriate Measures?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03302/) (2022)
- [DropConnect Is Effective in Modeling Uncertainty of Bayesian Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04569/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Uncertainty Quantification Methods for Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13425/) (2023)
- [Benchmarking Uncertainty Disentanglement: Specialized Uncertainties for Specialized Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19460/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Estimating the apparent age of individuals from facial images is challenging due to the subjective nature of perception and the inherent variability of the data. We investigate the role of uncertainty estimation, attributing uncertainty jointly to a lack of knowledge (epistemic) or inherent noise/chance (aleatoric). Leveraging the APPA-REAL dataset, we train Bayesian Neural Networks on datasets of varying sizes using three BNN approximations: MC-DropConnect, Flipout, and Deep Ensembles using supervision on human aleatoric uncertainty available in the APPA-REAL dataset. Each model outputs both the predicted apparent age and the amount of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty. Our results confirm the hypothesis that the inherent aleatoric uncertainty remains stable across dataset sizes, while epistemic uncertainty increases as training data decreases. These findings demonstrate that different sources of uncertainty can be quantified in face age estimation.