In plain words: A small add-on network bolted onto any existing neural net lets it guess how uncertain its answers are, instead of training hundreds of separate networks and averaging them. It beat ensembles of hundreds of models while using orders of magnitude less computing.
Abstract
Intelligence relies on an agent's knowledge of what it does not know. This capability can be assessed based on the quality of joint predictions of labels across multiple inputs. In principle, ensemble-based approaches produce effective joint predictions, but the computational costs of training large ensembles can become prohibitive. We introduce the epinet: an architecture that can supplement any conventional neural network, including large pretrained models, and can be trained with modest incremental computation to estimate uncertainty. With an epinet, conventional neural networks outperform very large ensembles, consisting of hundreds or more particles, with orders of magnitude less computation. The epinet does not fit the traditional framework of Bayesian neural networks. To accommodate development of approaches beyond BNNs, such as the epinet, we introduce the epistemic neural network (ENN) as an interface for models that produce joint predictions.
Ian Osband, Zheng Wen, Seyed Mohammad Asghari, Vikranth Dwaracherla, Morteza Ibrahimi, Xiuyuan Lu, Benjamin Van Roy
arXiv:2107.08924 · cs.LG, cs.AI, stat.ML · submitted Jul 19, 2021 · updated May 17, 2023
abstract · pdf · html