Hierarchical Uncertainty Exploration via Feedforward Posterior Trees

Published: 25 Sept 2024, Last Modified: 06 Nov 2024NeurIPS 2024 posterEveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Keywords: Uncertainty Quantification, Explainable Computer Vision, Inverse Problems, Computational Imaging, Hierarchical Clustering
TL;DR: We predict a tree-valued hierarchical summarization of the posterior distribution for any input measurement, in a single forward pass of a neural network
Abstract: When solving ill-posed inverse problems, one often desires to explore the space of potential solutions rather than be presented with a single plausible reconstruction. Valuable insights into these feasible solutions and their associated probabilities are embedded in the posterior distribution. However, when confronted with data of high dimensionality (such as images), visualizing this distribution becomes a formidable challenge, necessitating the application of effective summarization techniques before user examination. In this work, we introduce a new approach for visualizing posteriors across multiple levels of granularity using *tree*-valued predictions. Our method predicts a tree-valued hierarchical summarization of the posterior distribution for any input measurement, in a single forward pass of a neural network. We showcase the efficacy of our approach across diverse datasets and image restoration challenges, highlighting its prowess in uncertainty quantification and visualization. Our findings reveal that our method performs comparably to a baseline that hierarchically clusters samples from a diffusion-based posterior sampler, yet achieves this with orders of magnitude greater speed. Code and examples are available at our [webpage](https://eliasnehme.github.io/PosteriorTrees/).
Primary Area: Probabilistic methods (for example: variational inference, Gaussian processes)
Submission Number: 9906
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