Papers
Topics
Authors
Recent
Assistant
AI Research Assistant
Well-researched responses based on relevant abstracts and paper content.
Custom Instructions Pro
Preferences or requirements that you'd like Emergent Mind to consider when generating responses.
Gemini 2.5 Flash
Gemini 2.5 Flash 156 tok/s
Gemini 2.5 Pro 44 tok/s Pro
GPT-5 Medium 23 tok/s Pro
GPT-5 High 22 tok/s Pro
GPT-4o 109 tok/s Pro
Kimi K2 168 tok/s Pro
GPT OSS 120B 455 tok/s Pro
Claude Sonnet 4.5 32 tok/s Pro
2000 character limit reached

Beyond Point Estimate: Inferring Ensemble Prediction Variation from Neuron Activation Strength in Recommender Systems (2008.07032v1)

Published 17 Aug 2020 in cs.LG and stat.ML

Abstract: Despite deep neural network (DNN)'s impressive prediction performance in various domains, it is well known now that a set of DNN models trained with the same model specification and the same data can produce very different prediction results. Ensemble method is one state-of-the-art benchmark for prediction uncertainty estimation. However, ensembles are expensive to train and serve for web-scale traffic. In this paper, we seek to advance the understanding of prediction variation estimated by the ensemble method. Through empirical experiments on two widely used benchmark datasets MovieLens and Criteo in recommender systems, we observe that prediction variations come from various randomness sources, including training data shuffling, and parameter random initialization. By introducing more randomness into model training, we notice that ensemble's mean predictions tend to be more accurate while the prediction variations tend to be higher. Moreover, we propose to infer prediction variation from neuron activation strength and demonstrate the strong prediction power from activation strength features. Our experiment results show that the average R squared on MovieLens is as high as 0.56 and on Criteo is 0.81. Our method performs especially well when detecting the lowest and highest variation buckets, with 0.92 AUC and 0.89 AUC respectively. Our approach provides a simple way for prediction variation estimation, which opens up new opportunities for future work in many interesting areas (e.g.,model-based reinforcement learning) without relying on serving expensive ensemble models.

Citations (16)

Summary

We haven't generated a summary for this paper yet.

Lightbulb Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.com

Continue Learning

We haven't generated follow-up questions for this paper yet.

List To Do Tasks Checklist Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.com

Collections

Sign up for free to add this paper to one or more collections.

Don't miss out on important new AI/ML research

See which papers are being discussed right now on X, Reddit, and more:

“Emergent Mind helps me see which AI papers have caught fire online.”

Philip

Philip

Creator, AI Explained on YouTube