I have been exploring Bayesian strategies for the last year. Considering the limitations of neural network strategies (ex their need for large volumes of data) and the scenarios where we will never have enough data to model the problem, some Bayesian approaches could offer an alternative.
In that sense, I was interested to see a special workshop on Bayesian deep learning at neurips 21. The focus of the year’s program has been BDL methodologies and techniques in downstream / real world tasks.
I studied the abstracts of the papers (listed below) and chose six which I found interesting which I list below
Real problems, not addressible using traditional neural network models due to lack of data
The key lessons for me are
- Bayesian strategies are being increasingly employed with neural networks (after all the theme of the workshop)
- Bayesian strategies are being employed to overcome the limitations of neural networks (ex the availability of data)
- Bayesian neural networks are being employed in real life / mission critical applications
- Bayesian neural networks are explored in conjunction with advanced neural network strategies ex transformers
- Incorporating the knowledge of experts through Bayesian techniques into neural networks could extend neural networks into out of domain areas (ex in weather predictions)
Interesting papers below
Analytically Tractable Inference in Neural Networks – An Alternative to Backpropagation
Until now, neural networks have been predominantly relying on backpropagation and gradient descent as the inference engine in order to learn a neural network’s parameters. This is primarily because closed-form Bayesian inference for neural networks has been considered to be intractable. This short paper outlines a new analytical method for performing tractable approximate Gaussian inference (TAGI) in Bayesian neural networks.
Pathologies in Priors and Inference for Bayesian Transformers
Explore transformer models in terms of predictive uncertainty using Bayesian inference exist.
Deep Bayesian Learning for Car Hacking Detection
Investigate Deep Bayesian Learning models to detect and analyze car hacking behaviors. The Bayesian learning methods can capture the uncertainty of the data and avoid overconfident issues.
Precision Agriculture Based on Bayesian Neural Network
- Precision agriculture, utilizing various information to manage crop production, has become the important approach to imitate the food supply problem around the world. Accurate prediction of crop yield is the main task of precision agriculture.
- neural networks are notoriously data-hungry and data collection in agriculture is expensive and time-consuming.
- Bayesian neural network, extending the neural network with Bayes inference, is useful under such circumstance.
- Moreover, Bayesian allows to estimate uncertainty associated with prediction which makes the result more reliable.
- In this paper, a Bayesian neural network was applied a small dataset and the result shows Bayesian neural network is more reliable under such circumstance.
Benchmark for Out-of-Distribution Detection in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Out of distribution detection for RL is generally not well covered in the literature, and there is a lack of benchmarks for this task. Propose a benchmark to evaluate OOD detection methods in a Reinforcement Learning setting, by modifying the physical parameters of non-visual standard environments or corrupting the state observation for visual environments.
An Empirical Analysis of Uncertainty Estimation in Genomics Applications
Present an empirical analysis of uncertainty estimation approaches in Deep Learning models for genomic applications.
Robust Calibration For Improved Weather Prediction Under Distributional Shift
• present preliminary results on improving out-of-domain weather prediction and uncertainty estimation as part of the Shifts Challenge on Robustness and Uncertainty under Real-World Distributional Shift challenge.
• They find that by leveraging a mixture of experts in conjunction with an advanced data augmentation technique borrowed from the computer vision domain, in conjunction with robust post-hoc calibration of predictive uncertainties, we can potentially achieve more accurate and better-calibrated results with deep neural networks than with boosted tree models for tabular data.
Full list of papers below
Unveiling mode-connectivity of the ELBO landscape
Infinite-channel deep convolutional Stable neural networks
Analytically Tractable Inference in Neural Networks – An Alternative to Backpropagation
Pathologies in Priors and Inference for Bayesian Transformers
Resilience of Bayesian Layer-Wise Explanations under Adversarial Attacks
An Empirical Comparison of GANs and Normalizing Flows for Density Estimation
Reproducible, incremental representation learning with Rosetta VAE
Being a Bit Frequentist Improves Bayesian Neural Networks
Stochastic Local Winner-Takes-All Networks Enable Profound Adversarial Robustness
Non-stationary Gaussian process discriminant analysis with variable selection for high-dimensional functional data
Benchmarking Bayesian Deep Learning on Diabetic Retinopathy Detection Tasks
Deep Classifiers with Label Noise Modeling and Distance Awareness
Information-theoretic stochastic contrastive conditional GAN: InfoSCC-GAN
Generalization Gap in Amortized Inference
Evaluating Predictive Uncertainty and Robustness to Distributional Shift Using Real World Data
Uncertainty Quantification in End-to-End Implicit Neural Representations for Medical Imaging
Generation of data on discontinuous manifolds via continuous stochastic non-invertible networks
Uncertainty Baselines: Benchmarks for Uncertainty & Robustness in Deep Learning
Deep Bayesian Learning for Car Hacking Detection
Power-law asymptotics of the generalization error for GP regression under power-law priors and targets
Contrastive Representation Learning with Trainable Augmentation Channel
Structured Stochastic Gradient MCMC: a hybrid VI and MCMC approach
An Empirical Study of Neural Kernel Bandits
On Feature Collapse and Deep Kernel Learning for Single Forward Pass Uncertainty
Greedy Bayesian Posterior Approximation with Deep Ensembles
On Symmetries in Variational Bayesian Neural Nets
Certifiably Robust Variational Autoencoders
Contrastive Generative Adversarial Network for Anomaly Detection
Kronecker-Factored Optimal Curvature
Mixtures of Laplace Approximations for Improved Post-Hoc Uncertainty in Deep Learning
Exploring the Limits of Epistemic Uncertainty Quantification in Low-Shot Settings
Laplace Approximation with Diagonalized Hessian for Over-parameterized Neural Networks
Multimodal Relational VAE
Progress in Self-Certified Neural Networks
Funnels
Gaussian dropout as an information bottleneck layer
Decomposing Representations for Deterministic Uncertainty Estimation
Precision Agriculture Based on Bayesian Neural Network
Relaxed-Responsibility Hierarchical Discrete VAEs
Dependence between Bayesian neural network units
The Peril of Popular Deep Learning Uncertainty Estimation Methods
Depth Uncertainty Networks for Active Learning
Mixture-of-experts VAEs can disregard variation in surjective multimodal data
Can Network Flatness Explain the Training Speed-Generalisation Connection?
Benchmark for Out-of-Distribution Detection in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Dropout and Ensemble Networks for Thermospheric Density Uncertainty Estimation
On Efficient Uncertainty Estimation for Resource-Constrained Mobile Applications
Object-Factored Models with Partially Observable State
Likelihood-free Density Ratio Acquisition Functions are not Equivalent to Expected Improvements
Embedded-model flows: Combining the inductive biases of model-free deep learning and explicit probabilistic modeling
Evaluating Deep Learning Uncertainty Quantification Methods for Neutrino Physics Applications
Constraining cosmological parameters from N-body simulations with Bayesian Neural Networks
Latent Goal Allocation for Multi-Agent Goal-Conditioned Self-Supervised Imitation Learning
Reliable Uncertainty Quantification of Deep Learning Models for a Free Electron Laser Scientific Facility
Fast Finite Width Neural Tangent Kernel
Bayesian Inference in Augmented Bow Tie Networks
Biases in Variational Bayesian Neural Networks
The Dynamics of Functional Diversity throughout Neural Network Training
Robust outlier detection by de-biasing VAE likelihoods
Revisiting the Structured Variational Autoencoder
Posterior Temperature Optimization in Variational Inference for Inverse Problems
Adversarial Learning of a Variational Generative Model with Succinct Bottleneck Representation
Stochastic Pruning: Fine-Tuning, and PAC-Bayes bound optimization
Towards Robust Object Detection: Bayesian RetinaNet for Homoscedastic Aleatoric Uncertainty Modeling
Federated Functional Variational Inference
Reflected Hamiltonian Monte Carlo
Hierarchical Topic Evaluation: Statistical vs. Neural Models
Reducing redundancy in Semantic-KITTI: Study on data augmentations within Active Learning
An Empirical Analysis of Uncertainty Estimation in Genomics Applications
Robust Calibration For Improved Weather Prediction Under Distributional Shift
Diversity is All You Need to Improve Bayesian Model Averaging
SAE: Sequential Anchored Ensembles