arXiv AI
Oct 1

Signal-Routed Temperature Scaling: Low-Capacity Risk-Conditioned Calibration for Small Validation Budgets

Signal‑Routed Temperature Scaling (SRTS‑BCE) is a 10‑parameter, argmax‑preserving calibration method that separates calibration objectives from adaptive capacity. It cross‑fits a correctness‑risk score over six logit statistics and assigns a top‑label BCE temperature to each of three risk groups, generalizing TvA‑TS when K=1. Experiments on fine‑tuned CIFAR‑100 and ViT‑B/16 show that SRTS‑BCE reduces ECE from 1.65 to 0.96 with a small calibration budget, outperforming higher‑capacity SMART+BCE when only 250 examples are available, and revealing a budget‑dependent ranking reversal on Swin‑T.

By Wenhao Liang, Liangwei Nathan Zheng, Lin Yue, Wei Emma Zhang, Mingyu Guo, Olaf Maennel, Weitong Chen