Reliable predictive uncertainty estimation plays an important role in enabling the deployment of neural networks to safety-critical settings. A popular approach for estimating the predictive uncertainty of neural networks is to define a prior distribution over the network parameters, infer an approximate posterior distribution, and use it to make stochastic predictions. However, explicit inference over neural network parameters makes it difficult to incorporate meaningful prior information about the data-generating process into the model. In this paper, we pursue an alternative approach. Recognizing that the primary object of interest in most settings is the distribution over functions induced by the posterior distribution over neural network parameters, we frame Bayesian inference in neural networks explicitly as inferring a posterior distribution over functions and propose a scalable function-space variational inference method that allows incorporating prior information and results in reliable predictive uncertainty estimates. We show that the proposed method leads to state-of-the-art uncertainty estimation and predictive performance on a range of prediction tasks and demonstrate that it performs well on a challenging safety-critical medical diagnosis task in which reliable uncertainty estimation is essential.

在这篇论文中，我们提出了一个基于函数空间变分推断的可扩展函数空间变分推断方法，该方法明确地将贝叶斯推断应用于神经网络，并允许结合先验信息以产生可靠的预测不确定性评估。我们展示了该方法在一系列预测任务上的最新不确定性估计和预测性能，并证明其在安全关键的医学诊断任务中表现出色。

贝叶斯神经网络中可行的函数空间变分推理