Learning Expressive Priors for Generalization and Uncertainty Estimation in Neural Networks

Published: 20 Jun 2023, Last Modified: 18 Jul 2023AABI 2023 - Fast TrackEveryoneRevisionsBibTeX
Keywords: Bayesian Deep Learning, Prior Specification, Laplace Approximation
TL;DR: Scalable and structured posteriors of neural networks as informative priors with generalization guarantees
Abstract: In this work, we propose a novel prior learning method for advancing generalization and uncertainty estimation in deep neural networks. The key idea is to exploit scalable and structured posteriors of neural networks as informative priors with generalization guarantees. Our learned priors provide expressive probabilistic representations at large scale, like Bayesian counterparts of pre-trained models on ImageNet, and further produce non-vacuous generalization bounds. We also extend this idea to a continual learning framework, where the favorable properties of our priors are desirable. Major enablers are our technical contributions: (1) the sums-of-Kronecker-product computations, and (2) the derivations and optimizations of tractable objectives that lead to improved generalization bounds. Empirically, we exhaustively show the effectiveness of this method for uncertainty estimation and generalization.
Publication Venue: ICML 2023
Submission Number: 14
Loading