Grounding Predictive Reliability through Masked Observability

Abstract

An uncertainty estimate is meaningful only if its semantics can be tied to observable predictive behavior. Normal-Inverse-Gamma (NIG) evidential regression provides a structured decomposition of predictive variability into data-scale and predictive-mean components, but marginal likelihood does not identify their allocation. We address this semantic ambiguity in masked representation learning. MORSE (Masked Observability for Reliable Structured Encoding) predicts the same hidden target under controlled changes in visible context and uses normalized cross-context variation to ground predictive-mean uncertainty, while a Gaussian objective learns the conditional mean and data scale. The normalized variation plays the role of the NIG factor $1/ν$, which the marginal leaves unidentified; this yields a policy-relative observability variance that measures dependence on visible evidence, distinct from variation induced by resampling the training set. On a Gaussian-process benchmark with a contextual reference built from analytic Bayes conditional means, MORSE has the lowest log-variance error among compared evidential, ensemble, and dropout estimators in all nine tested settings, while the estimator closest to training-set variation perturbs the model rather than its context in every setting, so the two references separate the estimators empirically. MORSE amortizes observability estimation into one forward pass per observation state. On a heteroscedastic pulse benchmark, its predictor's cross-context variance approaches a large-sample reference as training data increase. MORSE also improves low-label transfer on PTB-XL and in-distribution trajectory prediction on IMPTC.