FSP-Laplace: Function-Space Priors for the Laplace Approximation in Bayesian Deep Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Cinquin, Tristan, Pförtner, Marvin, Fortuin, Vincent, Hennig, Philipp, Bamler, Robert
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Cinquin, Tristan
Pförtner, Marvin
Fortuin, Vincent
Hennig, Philipp
Bamler, Robert
author_facet Cinquin, Tristan
Pförtner, Marvin
Fortuin, Vincent
Hennig, Philipp
Bamler, Robert
contents Laplace approximations are popular techniques for endowing deep networks with epistemic uncertainty estimates as they can be applied without altering the predictions of the trained network, and they scale to large models and datasets. While the choice of prior strongly affects the resulting posterior distribution, computational tractability and lack of interpretability of the weight space typically limit the Laplace approximation to isotropic Gaussian priors, which are known to cause pathological behavior as depth increases. As a remedy, we directly place a prior on function space. More precisely, since Lebesgue densities do not exist on infinite-dimensional function spaces, we recast training as finding the so-called weak mode of the posterior measure under a Gaussian process (GP) prior restricted to the space of functions representable by the neural network. Through the GP prior, one can express structured and interpretable inductive biases, such as regularity or periodicity, directly in function space, while still exploiting the implicit inductive biases that allow deep networks to generalize. After model linearization, the training objective induces a negative log-posterior density to which we apply a Laplace approximation, leveraging highly scalable methods from matrix-free linear algebra. Our method provides improved results where prior knowledge is abundant (as is the case in many scientific inference tasks). At the same time, it stays competitive for black-box supervised learning problems, where neural networks typically excel.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_13711
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FSP-Laplace: Function-Space Priors for the Laplace Approximation in Bayesian Deep Learning
Cinquin, Tristan
Pförtner, Marvin
Fortuin, Vincent
Hennig, Philipp
Bamler, Robert
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Laplace approximations are popular techniques for endowing deep networks with epistemic uncertainty estimates as they can be applied without altering the predictions of the trained network, and they scale to large models and datasets. While the choice of prior strongly affects the resulting posterior distribution, computational tractability and lack of interpretability of the weight space typically limit the Laplace approximation to isotropic Gaussian priors, which are known to cause pathological behavior as depth increases. As a remedy, we directly place a prior on function space. More precisely, since Lebesgue densities do not exist on infinite-dimensional function spaces, we recast training as finding the so-called weak mode of the posterior measure under a Gaussian process (GP) prior restricted to the space of functions representable by the neural network. Through the GP prior, one can express structured and interpretable inductive biases, such as regularity or periodicity, directly in function space, while still exploiting the implicit inductive biases that allow deep networks to generalize. After model linearization, the training objective induces a negative log-posterior density to which we apply a Laplace approximation, leveraging highly scalable methods from matrix-free linear algebra. Our method provides improved results where prior knowledge is abundant (as is the case in many scientific inference tasks). At the same time, it stays competitive for black-box supervised learning problems, where neural networks typically excel.
title FSP-Laplace: Function-Space Priors for the Laplace Approximation in Bayesian Deep Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.13711