No Arabic abstract
Bayesian decision theory provides an elegant framework for acting optimally under uncertainty when tractable posterior distributions are available. Modern Bayesian models, however, typically involve intractable posteriors that are approximated with, potentially crude, surrogates. This difficulty has engendered loss-calibrated techniques that aim to learn posterior approximations that favor high-utility decisions. In this paper, focusing on Bayesian neural networks, we develop methods for correcting approximate posterior predictive distributions encouraging them to prefer high-utility decisions. In contrast to previous work, our approach is agnostic to the choice of the approximate inference algorithm, allows for efficient test time decision making through amortization, and empirically produces higher quality decisions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through controlled experiments spanning a diversity of tasks and datasets.
Calibration of neural networks is a critical aspect to consider when incorporating machine learning models in real-world decision-making systems where the confidence of decisions are equally important as the decisions themselves. In recent years, there is a surge of research on neural network calibration and the majority of the works can be categorized into post-hoc calibration methods, defined as methods that learn an additional function to calibrate an already trained base network. In this work, we intend to understand the post-hoc calibration methods from a theoretical point of view. Especially, it is known that minimizing Negative Log-Likelihood (NLL) will lead to a calibrated network on the training set if the global optimum is attained (Bishop, 1994). Nevertheless, it is not clear learning an additional function in a post-hoc manner would lead to calibration in the theoretical sense. To this end, we prove that even though the base network ($f$) does not lead to the global optimum of NLL, by adding additional layers ($g$) and minimizing NLL by optimizing the parameters of $g$ one can obtain a calibrated network $g circ f$. This not only provides a less stringent condition to obtain a calibrated network but also provides a theoretical justification of post-hoc calibration methods. Our experiments on various image classification benchmarks confirm the theory.
We address the problem of uncertainty calibration. While standard deep neural networks typically yield uncalibrated predictions, calibrated confidence scores that are representative of the true likelihood of a prediction can be achieved using post-hoc calibration methods. However, to date the focus of these approaches has been on in-domain calibration. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we show that existing post-hoc calibration methods yield highly over-confident predictions under domain shift. Second, we introduce a simple strategy where perturbations are applied to samples in the validation set before performing the post-hoc calibration step. In extensive experiments, we demonstrate that this perturbation step results in substantially better calibration under domain shift on a wide range of architectures and modelling tasks.
We study probabilistic safety for Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) under adversarial input perturbations. Given a compact set of input points, $T subseteq mathbb{R}^m$, we study the probability w.r.t. the BNN posterior that all the points in $T$ are mapped to the same region $S$ in the output space. In particular, this can be used to evaluate the probability that a network sampled from the BNN is vulnerable to adversarial attacks. We rely on relaxation techniques from non-convex optimization to develop a method for computing a lower bound on probabilistic safety for BNNs, deriving explicit procedures for the case of interval and linear function propagation techniques. We apply our methods to BNNs trained on a regression task, airborne collision avoidance, and MNIST, empirically showing that our approach allows one to certify probabilistic safety of BNNs with millions of parameters.
Variational Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) perform variational inference over weights, but it is difficult to specify meaningful priors and approximate posteriors in a high-dimensional weight space. We introduce functional variational Bayesian neural networks (fBNNs), which maximize an Evidence Lower BOund (ELBO) defined directly on stochastic processes, i.e. distributions over functions. We prove that the KL divergence between stochastic processes equals the supremum of marginal KL divergences over all finite sets of inputs. Based on this, we introduce a practical training objective which approximates the functional ELBO using finite measurement sets and the spectral Stein gradient estimator. With fBNNs, we can specify priors entailing rich structures, including Gaussian processes and implicit stochastic processes. Empirically, we find fBNNs extrapolate well using various structured priors, provide reliable uncertainty estimates, and scale to large datasets.
Bayesian neural network (BNN) priors are defined in parameter space, making it hard to encode prior knowledge expressed in function space. We formulate a prior that incorporates functional constraints about what the output can or cannot be in regions of the input space. Output-Constrained BNNs (OC-BNN) represent an interpretable approach of enforcing a range of constraints, fully consistent with the Bayesian framework and amenable to black-box inference. We demonstrate how OC-BNNs improve model robustness and prevent the prediction of infeasible outputs in two real-world applications of healthcare and robotics.