Generalized Variational Inference in Function Spaces: Gaussian Measures meet Bayesian Deep Learning
Published in arxiv, 2022
Recommended citation: Veit D. Wild, Robert Hu and Dino Sejdinovic (2022). "Generalized Variational Inference in Function Spaces: Gaussian Measures meet Bayesian Deep Learning." arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.06342.
We develop a framework for generalized variational inference in infinite-dimensional function spaces and use it to construct a method termed Gaussian Wasserstein inference (GWI). GWI leverages the Wasserstein distance between Gaussian measures on the Hilbert space of square-integrable functions in order to determine a variational posterior using a tractable optimization criterion and avoids pathologies arising in standard variational function space inference. An exciting application of GWI is the ability to use deep neural networks in the variational parametrisation of GWI, combining their superior predictive performance with the principled uncertainty quantification analogous to that of Gaussian processes. The proposed method obtains state-of-the-art performance on several benchmark datasets.