Improving Accuracy and Calibration via Differentiated Deep Mutual Learning

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable success in a variety of tasks, particularly in terms of prediction accuracy. However, in real-world scenarios, especially in safety-critical applications, accuracy alone is insufficient; reliable uncertainty estimates are essential. Modern DNNs, often trained with cross-entropy loss, tend to exhibit overconfidence, especially on ambiguous samples. Many techniques aim to improve uncertainty calibration, yet they often come at the cost of reduced accuracy or increased computational demands. To address this challenge, we propose Differentiated Deep Mutual Learning (Diff-DML), an efficient ensemble approach that simultaneously enhances accuracy and uncertainty calibration. Diff-DML draws inspiration from Deep Mutual Learning (DML) while introducing two strategies to maintain prediction diversity: (1) Differentiated Training Strategy (DTS) and (2) Diversity-Preserving Learning Objective (DPLO). Our theoretical analysis shows that Diff-DML’s diversified learning framework not only leverages ensemble benefits but also avoids the loss of prediction diversity observed in traditional DML setups, which is crucial for improved calibration. Extensive evaluations on various benchmarks confirm the effectiveness of Diff-DML. For instance, on the CIFAR-100 dataset, Diff-DML on ResNet34/50 models achieved substantial improvements over the previous state-of-the-art method, MDCA, with absolute accuracy gains of 1.3%/3.1%, relative ECE reductions of 49.6%/43.8%, and relative classwise-ECE reductions of 7.7%/13.0%.