No Arabic abstract
We present a practical way of introducing convolutional structure into Gaussian processes, making them more suited to high-dimensional inputs like images. The main contribution of our work is the construction of an inter-domain inducing point approximation that is well-tailored to the convolutional kernel. This allows us to gain the generalisation benefit of a convolutional kernel, together with fast but accurate posterior inference. We investigate several variations of the convolutional kernel, and apply it to MNIST and CIFAR-10, which have both been known to be challenging for Gaussian processes. We also show how the marginal likelihood can be used to find an optimal weighting between convolutional and RBF kernels to further improve performance. We hope that this illustration of the usefulness of a marginal likelihood will help automate discovering architectures in larger models.
We show that the output of a (residual) convolutional neural network (CNN) with an appropriate prior over the weights and biases is a Gaussian process (GP) in the limit of infinitely many convolutional filters, extending similar results for dense networks. For a CNN, the equivalent kernel can be computed exactly and, unlike deep kernels, has very few parameters: only the hyperparameters of the original CNN. Further, we show that this kernel has two properties that allow it to be computed efficiently; the cost of evaluating the kernel for a pair of images is similar to a single forward pass through the original CNN with only one filter per layer. The kernel equivalent to a 32-layer ResNet obtains 0.84% classification error on MNIST, a new record for GPs with a comparable number of parameters.
Gaussian process models are flexible, Bayesian non-parametric approaches to regression. Properties of multivariate Gaussians mean that they can be combined linearly in the manner of additive models and via a link function (like in generalized linear models) to handle non-Gaussian data. However, the link function formalism is restrictive, link functions are always invertible and must convert a parameter of interest to a linear combination of the underlying processes. There are many likelihoods and models where a non-linear combination is more appropriate. We term these more general models Chained Gaussian Processes: the transformation of the GPs to the likelihood parameters will not generally be invertible, and that implies that linearisation would only be possible with multiple (localized) links, i.e. a chain. We develop an approximate inference procedure for Chained GPs that is scalable and applicable to any factorized likelihood. We demonstrate the approximation on a range of likelihood functions.
A major challenge for machine learning is increasing the availability of data while respecting the privacy of individuals. Here we combine the provable privacy guarantees of the differential privacy framework with the flexibility of Gaussian processes (GPs). We propose a method using GPs to provide differentially private (DP) regression. We then improve this method by crafting the DP noise covariance structure to efficiently protect the training data, while minimising the scale of the added noise. We find that this cloaking method achieves the greatest accuracy, while still providing privacy guarantees, and offers practical DP for regression over multi-dimensional inputs. Together these methods provide a starter toolkit for combining differential privacy and GPs.
The data association problem is concerned with separating data coming from different generating processes, for example when data come from different data sources, contain significant noise, or exhibit multimodality. We present a fully Bayesian approach to this problem. Our model is capable of simultaneously solving the data association problem and the induced supervised learning problems. Underpinning our approach is the use of Gaussian process priors to encode the structure of both the data and the data associations. We present an efficient learning scheme based on doubly stochastic variational inference and discuss how it can be applied to deep Gaussian process priors.
As Gaussian processes are used to answer increasingly complex questions, analytic solutions become scarcer and scarcer. Monte Carlo methods act as a convenient bridge for connecting intractable mathematical expressions with actionable estimates via sampling. Conventional approaches for simulating Gaussian process posteriors view samples as draws from marginal distributions of process values at finite sets of input locations. This distribution-centric characterization leads to generative strategies that scale cubically in the size of the desired random vector. These methods are prohibitively expensive in cases where we would, ideally, like to draw high-dimensional vectors or even continuous sample paths. In this work, we investigate a different line of reasoning: rather than focusing on distributions, we articulate Gaussian conditionals at the level of random variables. We show how this pathwise interpretation of conditioning gives rise to a general family of approximations that lend themselves to efficiently sampling Gaussian process posteriors. Starting from first principles, we derive these methods and analyze the approximation errors they introduce. We, then, ground these results by exploring the practical implications of pathwise conditioning in various applied settings, such as global optimization and reinforcement learning.