Bayesian inference is known to provide a general framework for incorporating prior knowledge or specific properties into machine learning models via carefully choosing a prior distribution. In this work, we propose a new type of prior distributions for convolutional neural networks, deep weight prior, that in contrast to previously published techniques, favors empirically estimated structure of convolutional filters e.g., spatial correlations of weights. We define deep weight prior as an implicit distribution and propose a method for variational inference with such type of implicit priors. In experiments, we show that deep weight priors can improve the performance of Bayesian neural networks on several problems when training data is limited. Also, we found that initialization of weights of conventional networks with samples from deep weight prior leads to faster training.

本文提出了深度权重先验（DWP）作为深度卷积神经网络的新型先验分布。DWP利用生成模型来鼓励已训练卷积滤波器的特定结构，例如权重之间的空间相关性。作者提出了一种变分推断方法来处理这种隐式先验分布，并通过实验证明，当训练数据有限时，使用DWP可以改进贝叶斯神经网络的性能，使用DWP样本初始化权重也可以加速传统卷积神经网络的训练。