Failure Prediction Is a Better Performance Proxy for Early-Exit Networks Than Calibration (2508.21495v1)

Abstract: Early-exit models speed up inference by attaching internal classifiers to intermediate layers of the model and allowing computation to stop once a prediction satisfies an exit criterion. Most early-exit methods rely on confidence-based exit strategies, which motivated some works to calibrate intermediate classifiers to improve the performance of the entire model. In this paper, we show that calibration measures can be misleading indicators of the performance of multi-exit models: a well-calibrated classifier may still waste computation, and common calibration methods do not preserve the sample ranking within a classifier. We demonstrate empirical cases where miscalibrated networks outperform calibrated ones. As an alternative, we propose to use failure prediction as a more useful proxy for early-exit model performance. Unlike calibration, failure prediction accounts for changes in the ranking of samples and shows a strong correlation with efficiency improvements, making it a more dependable basis for designing and evaluating early-exit models.