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Do Bayesian Neural Networks Need to Be Fully Stochastic? (arxiv.org)
3 points by ShoutAtTheDevil on Nov 20, 2022 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A network that gives a range of possible answers instead of one usually makes every internal number random. Making just a few numbers random is enough: it matched or sometimes beat the fully random version across eight datasets while using less memory.

Abstract · Do Bayesian Neural Networks Need To Be Fully Stochastic?

We investigate the benefit of treating all the parameters in a Bayesian neural network stochastically and find compelling theoretical and empirical evidence that this standard construction may be unnecessary. To this end, we prove that expressive predictive distributions require only small amounts of stochasticity. In particular, partially stochastic networks with only $n$ stochastic biases are universal probabilistic predictors for $n$-dimensional predictive problems. In empirical investigations, we find no systematic benefit of full stochasticity across four different inference modalities and eight datasets; partially stochastic networks can match and sometimes even outperform fully stochastic networks, despite their reduced memory costs.

Mrinank Sharma, Sebastian Farquhar, Eric Nalisnick, Tom Rainforth
arXiv:2211.06291 · cs.LG, cs.AI, stat.ML · submitted Nov 11, 2022 · updated Feb 20, 2023
abstract · pdf · html · Published at AISTATS2023 (Oral)

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