Accelerating Monte Carlo Bayesian Prediction via Approximating Predictive Uncertainty Over the Simplex

Research output: Journal Publications and ReviewsRGC 21 - Publication in refereed journalpeer-review

6 Scopus Citations
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Detail(s)

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1492-1506
Journal / PublicationIEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems
Volume33
Issue number4
Online published23 Dec 2020
Publication statusPublished - Apr 2022

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Abstract

Estimating the predictive uncertainty of a Bayesian learning model is critical in various decision-making problems, e.g., reinforcement learning, detecting the adversarial attack, self-driving car. As the model posterior is almost always intractable, most efforts were made on finding an accurate approximation to the true posterior. Even though a decent estimation of the model posterior is obtained, another approximation is required to compute the predictive distribution over the desired output. A common accurate solution is to use Monte Carlo (MC) integration. However, it needs to maintain a large number of samples, evaluate the model repeatedly and average multiple model outputs. In many real world cases, this is computationally prohibitive. In this work, assuming that the exact posterior or a decent approximation is obtained, we propose a generic framework to approximate the output probability distribution induced by the model posterior with a parameterized model and in an amortized fashion. The aim is to approximate the predictive uncertainty of a specific Bayesian model, meanwhile alleviating the heavy workload of MC integration at testing time. The proposed method is universally applicable to Bayesian classification models that allow for posterior sampling. Theoretically, we show that the idea of amortization incurs no additional costs on approximation performance. Empirical results validate the strong practical performance of our approach.

Research Area(s)

  • Bayes method, deep neural network (NN), knowledge distillation, predictive uncertainty.

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