Bayesian Hypernetworks

David Krueger, Chin-Wei Huang, Riashat Islam, Ryan Turner, Alexandre Lacoste, Aaron Courville

Abstract: We propose Bayesian hypernetworks: a framework for approximate Bayesian inference in neural networks. A Bayesian hypernetwork, h, is a neural network which learns to transform a simple noise distribution, p(e) = N(0,I), to a distribution q(t) := q(h(e)) over the parameters t of another neural network (the ``primary network). We train q with variational inference, using an invertible h to enable efficient estimation of the variational lower bound on the posterior p(t | D) via sampling. In contrast to most methods for Bayesian deep learning, Bayesian hypernets can represent a complex multimodal approximate posterior with correlations between parameters, while enabling cheap iid sampling of q(t). In practice, Bayesian hypernets provide a better defense against adversarial examples than dropout, and also exhibit competitive performance on a suite of tasks which evaluate model uncertainty, including regularization, active learning, and anomaly detection.

TL;DR: We propose Bayesian hypernetworks: a framework for approximate Bayesian inference in neural networks.

Keywords: variational inference, bayesian inference, deep networks