Residual Calibration via Local Feature-Space Refinement

Authors: Xihao Wang, Chengyao Yu, Ruixing Ming

Abstract

Deep neural networks often struggle to provide reliable confidence estimates, making post-hoc calibration essential for reliable decision-making. Existing post-hoc methods largely rely on score-based transformations, which improve marginal calibration but often fail to capture spatially varying miscalibration in local regions of the learned feature space. To address this gap, we propose *Local Adaptive Probability Estimation* (LAPE), a post-hoc residual calibration framework. Specifically, LAPE treats the global calibrator output as a stable anchor and refines the individual prediction by leveraging non-parametric local evidence from neighboring calibration samples. As a plug-and-play refinement module, LAPE effectively utilizes the information about feature-space geometry and can reuse the calibration data that are used to construct the global calibrator. Furthermore, we extend LAPE to the setting with multi-view inputs through *Cascade Feature Augmentation Fusion* (CFAF). Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed methods can improve the calibration quality of various existing baselines and remain efficient and robust across different settings.

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