arXiv Machine Learning

Predicting silent failures of learned inference under restricted access: what measurement physics and prior information explain

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 2

Wrong Operator or Blind Design? A Reference-Free Diagnostic for Physics-Informed Coefficient Learning

The paper introduces a reference‑free diagnostic for physics‑informed neural networks that learn partial differential equation coefficients from noisy data. It presents three tests—an information‑matrix residual test, a heterogeneity statistic across window refits, and a Fisher‑rank statistic on the design—that can detect whether the operator used in the model is incorrect or whether the design is blind to certain rates, all without retraining the network. The authors demonstrate the method on a parabolic benchmark with 2 % noise, showing that the diagnostics reliably flag misspecified operators and blind designs while remaining silent when the model is correctly specified.

By Eric Fock
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 11

A Calibration Audit of Confidence in Feed-Forward 3D Reconstruction Models

The paper audits the confidence outputs of seven feed‑forward 3D reconstruction backbones across 13 datasets, evaluating four properties: error ranking, average error‑to‑uncertainty ratio, slope of this ratio, and coverage of the implied error distribution. While confidence ranks errors well, the decoded uncertainty is consistently too small—off by at least 2.4× on median cases—and worsens with higher confidence. A post‑hoc power‑law fit per backbone‑dataset pair improves all four metrics at the dataset level, reducing the median error by 1.35×, but fails to correct coverage for many held‑out scenes, indicating the models lack the correct error scale and distribution shape.

By Nanxing Nick Deng, Qing Cheng, Niclas Zeller, Daniel Cremers