Confnet: Predict with Confidence

Abstract

In this paper, we propose Confidence Network (ConfNet) which not only makes predictions on input images but also generates a confidence score that estimates the probability of correctness of each prediction. Furthermore, Confidence Loss is proposed to make ConfNet automatically learn confidence scores in the training phase. The experiments on two public datasets show that the confidence scores generated by ConfNet are highly correlated with the model accuracy and outperforms two related methods. When stacking two ConfNets in a cascade structure, 3.8x computational cost can be saved compared to the single state-of-the-art model with only 0.1 % increase of error rate.