Proceedings Article•
Dropout as a Bayesian approximation: representing model uncertainty in deep learning
19 Jun 2016-pp 1050-1059
TL;DR: A new theoretical framework is developed casting dropout training in deep neural networks (NNs) as approximate Bayesian inference in deep Gaussian processes, which mitigates the problem of representing uncertainty in deep learning without sacrificing either computational complexity or test accuracy.
Abstract: Deep learning tools have gained tremendous attention in applied machine learning. However such tools for regression and classification do not capture model uncertainty. In comparison, Bayesian models offer a mathematically grounded framework to reason about model uncertainty, but usually come with a prohibitive computational cost. In this paper we develop a new theoretical framework casting dropout training in deep neural networks (NNs) as approximate Bayesian inference in deep Gaussian processes. A direct result of this theory gives us tools to model uncertainty with dropout NNs - extracting information from existing models that has been thrown away so far. This mitigates the problem of representing uncertainty in deep learning without sacrificing either computational complexity or test accuracy. We perform an extensive study of the properties of dropout's uncertainty. Various network architectures and nonlinearities are assessed on tasks of regression and classification, using MNIST as an example. We show a considerable improvement in predictive log-likelihood and RMSE compared to existing state-of-the-art methods, and finish by using dropout's uncertainty in deep reinforcement learning.
Citations
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TL;DR: An efficient and effective dense training scheme which joins the processing of adjacent image patches into one pass through the network while automatically adapting to the inherent class imbalance present in the data, and improves on the state-of-the‐art for all three applications.
2,842 citations
Cites background from "Dropout as a Bayesian approximation..."
...An example is the recent work of Gal and Ghahramani (2015) who show that model confidence can be estimated via sampling the dropout mask....
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Posted Content•
TL;DR: In this article, a new theoretical framework casting dropout training in deep neural networks (NNs) as approximate Bayesian inference in deep Gaussian processes was developed, which mitigates the problem of representing uncertainty in deep learning without sacrificing either computational complexity or test accuracy.
Abstract: Deep learning tools have gained tremendous attention in applied machine learning. However such tools for regression and classification do not capture model uncertainty. In comparison, Bayesian models offer a mathematically grounded framework to reason about model uncertainty, but usually come with a prohibitive computational cost. In this paper we develop a new theoretical framework casting dropout training in deep neural networks (NNs) as approximate Bayesian inference in deep Gaussian processes. A direct result of this theory gives us tools to model uncertainty with dropout NNs -- extracting information from existing models that has been thrown away so far. This mitigates the problem of representing uncertainty in deep learning without sacrificing either computational complexity or test accuracy. We perform an extensive study of the properties of dropout's uncertainty. Various network architectures and non-linearities are assessed on tasks of regression and classification, using MNIST as an example. We show a considerable improvement in predictive log-likelihood and RMSE compared to existing state-of-the-art methods, and finish by using dropout's uncertainty in deep reinforcement learning.
2,261 citations
TL;DR: Virtual adversarial training (VAT) as discussed by the authors is a regularization method based on virtual adversarial loss, which is a measure of local smoothness of the conditional label distribution given input.
Abstract: We propose a new regularization method based on virtual adversarial loss: a new measure of local smoothness of the conditional label distribution given input. Virtual adversarial loss is defined as the robustness of the conditional label distribution around each input data point against local perturbation. Unlike adversarial training, our method defines the adversarial direction without label information and is hence applicable to semi-supervised learning. Because the directions in which we smooth the model are only “virtually” adversarial, we call our method virtual adversarial training (VAT). The computational cost of VAT is relatively low. For neural networks, the approximated gradient of virtual adversarial loss can be computed with no more than two pairs of forward- and back-propagations. In our experiments, we applied VAT to supervised and semi-supervised learning tasks on multiple benchmark datasets. With a simple enhancement of the algorithm based on the entropy minimization principle, our VAT achieves state-of-the-art performance for semi-supervised learning tasks on SVHN and CIFAR-10.
1,991 citations
Posted Content•
TL;DR: It is discovered that modern neural networks, unlike those from a decade ago, are poorly calibrated, and on most datasets, temperature scaling -- a single-parameter variant of Platt Scaling -- is surprisingly effective at calibrating predictions.
Abstract: Confidence calibration -- the problem of predicting probability estimates representative of the true correctness likelihood -- is important for classification models in many applications. We discover that modern neural networks, unlike those from a decade ago, are poorly calibrated. Through extensive experiments, we observe that depth, width, weight decay, and Batch Normalization are important factors influencing calibration. We evaluate the performance of various post-processing calibration methods on state-of-the-art architectures with image and document classification datasets. Our analysis and experiments not only offer insights into neural network learning, but also provide a simple and straightforward recipe for practical settings: on most datasets, temperature scaling -- a single-parameter variant of Platt Scaling -- is surprisingly effective at calibrating predictions.
1,883 citations
Posted Content•
TL;DR: A list of five practical research problems related to accident risk, categorized according to whether the problem originates from having the wrong objective function, an objective function that is too expensive to evaluate frequently, or undesirable behavior during the learning process, are presented.
Abstract: Rapid progress in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) has brought increasing attention to the potential impacts of AI technologies on society. In this paper we discuss one such potential impact: the problem of accidents in machine learning systems, defined as unintended and harmful behavior that may emerge from poor design of real-world AI systems. We present a list of five practical research problems related to accident risk, categorized according to whether the problem originates from having the wrong objective function ("avoiding side effects" and "avoiding reward hacking"), an objective function that is too expensive to evaluate frequently ("scalable supervision"), or undesirable behavior during the learning process ("safe exploration" and "distributional shift"). We review previous work in these areas as well as suggesting research directions with a focus on relevance to cutting-edge AI systems. Finally, we consider the high-level question of how to think most productively about the safety of forward-looking applications of AI.
1,569 citations
Cites background from "Dropout as a Bayesian approximation..."
...…in that the former involves attacks against a legitimate ML system by an adversary (e.g. a criminal tries to fool a face recognition system), while the latter involves attacks by an ML system controlled by an adversary (e.g. a criminal trains a “smart hacker” system to break into a website)....
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References
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Proceedings Article•
01 Jan 2015TL;DR: This work introduces Adam, an algorithm for first-order gradient-based optimization of stochastic objective functions, based on adaptive estimates of lower-order moments, and provides a regret bound on the convergence rate that is comparable to the best known results under the online convex optimization framework.
Abstract: We introduce Adam, an algorithm for first-order gradient-based optimization of stochastic objective functions, based on adaptive estimates of lower-order moments. The method is straightforward to implement, is computationally efficient, has little memory requirements, is invariant to diagonal rescaling of the gradients, and is well suited for problems that are large in terms of data and/or parameters. The method is also appropriate for non-stationary objectives and problems with very noisy and/or sparse gradients. The hyper-parameters have intuitive interpretations and typically require little tuning. Some connections to related algorithms, on which Adam was inspired, are discussed. We also analyze the theoretical convergence properties of the algorithm and provide a regret bound on the convergence rate that is comparable to the best known results under the online convex optimization framework. Empirical results demonstrate that Adam works well in practice and compares favorably to other stochastic optimization methods. Finally, we discuss AdaMax, a variant of Adam based on the infinity norm.
111,197 citations
"Dropout as a Bayesian approximation..." refers methods in this paper
...Finally, we used mini-batches of size 32 and the Adam optimiser [38]....
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...Finally, we used mini-batches of size 32 and the Adam optimiser (Kingma & Ba, 2014)....
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01 Jan 1998
TL;DR: In this article, a graph transformer network (GTN) is proposed for handwritten character recognition, which can be used to synthesize a complex decision surface that can classify high-dimensional patterns, such as handwritten characters.
Abstract: Multilayer neural networks trained with the back-propagation algorithm constitute the best example of a successful gradient based learning technique. Given an appropriate network architecture, gradient-based learning algorithms can be used to synthesize a complex decision surface that can classify high-dimensional patterns, such as handwritten characters, with minimal preprocessing. This paper reviews various methods applied to handwritten character recognition and compares them on a standard handwritten digit recognition task. Convolutional neural networks, which are specifically designed to deal with the variability of 2D shapes, are shown to outperform all other techniques. Real-life document recognition systems are composed of multiple modules including field extraction, segmentation recognition, and language modeling. A new learning paradigm, called graph transformer networks (GTN), allows such multimodule systems to be trained globally using gradient-based methods so as to minimize an overall performance measure. Two systems for online handwriting recognition are described. Experiments demonstrate the advantage of global training, and the flexibility of graph transformer networks. A graph transformer network for reading a bank cheque is also described. It uses convolutional neural network character recognizers combined with global training techniques to provide record accuracy on business and personal cheques. It is deployed commercially and reads several million cheques per day.
42,067 citations
Journal Article•
TL;DR: It is shown that dropout improves the performance of neural networks on supervised learning tasks in vision, speech recognition, document classification and computational biology, obtaining state-of-the-art results on many benchmark data sets.
Abstract: Deep neural nets with a large number of parameters are very powerful machine learning systems. However, overfitting is a serious problem in such networks. Large networks are also slow to use, making it difficult to deal with overfitting by combining the predictions of many different large neural nets at test time. Dropout is a technique for addressing this problem. The key idea is to randomly drop units (along with their connections) from the neural network during training. This prevents units from co-adapting too much. During training, dropout samples from an exponential number of different "thinned" networks. At test time, it is easy to approximate the effect of averaging the predictions of all these thinned networks by simply using a single unthinned network that has smaller weights. This significantly reduces overfitting and gives major improvements over other regularization methods. We show that dropout improves the performance of neural networks on supervised learning tasks in vision, speech recognition, document classification and computational biology, obtaining state-of-the-art results on many benchmark data sets.
33,597 citations
"Dropout as a Bayesian approximation..." refers background or methods in this paper
...Dropout is used in many models in deep learning as a way to avoid over-fitting (Srivastava et al., 2014), and our interpretation suggests that dropout approximately integrates over the models’ weights....
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...Furthermore, our results carry to other variants of dropout as well (such as drop-connect (Wan et al., 2013), multiplicative Gaussian noise (Srivastava et al., 2014), etc.)....
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...In this paper we give a complete theoretical treatment of the link between Gaussian processes and dropout, and develop the tools necessary to represent uncertainty in deep learning....
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TL;DR: This work bridges the divide between high-dimensional sensory inputs and actions, resulting in the first artificial agent that is capable of learning to excel at a diverse array of challenging tasks.
Abstract: The theory of reinforcement learning provides a normative account, deeply rooted in psychological and neuroscientific perspectives on animal behaviour, of how agents may optimize their control of an environment. To use reinforcement learning successfully in situations approaching real-world complexity, however, agents are confronted with a difficult task: they must derive efficient representations of the environment from high-dimensional sensory inputs, and use these to generalize past experience to new situations. Remarkably, humans and other animals seem to solve this problem through a harmonious combination of reinforcement learning and hierarchical sensory processing systems, the former evidenced by a wealth of neural data revealing notable parallels between the phasic signals emitted by dopaminergic neurons and temporal difference reinforcement learning algorithms. While reinforcement learning agents have achieved some successes in a variety of domains, their applicability has previously been limited to domains in which useful features can be handcrafted, or to domains with fully observed, low-dimensional state spaces. Here we use recent advances in training deep neural networks to develop a novel artificial agent, termed a deep Q-network, that can learn successful policies directly from high-dimensional sensory inputs using end-to-end reinforcement learning. We tested this agent on the challenging domain of classic Atari 2600 games. We demonstrate that the deep Q-network agent, receiving only the pixels and the game score as inputs, was able to surpass the performance of all previous algorithms and achieve a level comparable to that of a professional human games tester across a set of 49 games, using the same algorithm, network architecture and hyperparameters. This work bridges the divide between high-dimensional sensory inputs and actions, resulting in the first artificial agent that is capable of learning to excel at a diverse array of challenging tasks.
23,074 citations
Proceedings Article•
01 Jan 2014TL;DR: A stochastic variational inference and learning algorithm that scales to large datasets and, under some mild differentiability conditions, even works in the intractable case is introduced.
Abstract: How can we perform efficient inference and learning in directed probabilistic models, in the presence of continuous latent variables with intractable posterior distributions, and large datasets? We introduce a stochastic variational inference and learning algorithm that scales to large datasets and, under some mild differentiability conditions, even works in the intractable case. Our contributions is two-fold. First, we show that a reparameterization of the variational lower bound yields a lower bound estimator that can be straightforwardly optimized using standard stochastic gradient methods. Second, we show that for i.i.d. datasets with continuous latent variables per datapoint, posterior inference can be made especially efficient by fitting an approximate inference model (also called a recognition model) to the intractable posterior using the proposed lower bound estimator. Theoretical advantages are reflected in experimental results.
20,769 citations
"Dropout as a Bayesian approximation..." refers background or methods in this paper
...Recent advances in variational inference introduced new techniques into the field such as sampling-based variational inference and stochastic variational inference (Blei et al., 2012; Kingma & Welling, 2013; Rezende et al., 2014; Titsias & LázaroGredilla, 2014; Hoffman et al., 2013)....
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...Recent advances in variational inference introduced new techniques such as sampling-based variational inference and stochastic variational inference [21, 22, 23, 24, 25]....
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