Related papers: Variational Distributional Neuron
Recently a million of biological neurons (BNN) has turned out better from modern RL methods in playing Pong~\cite{RL}, reminding they are still qualitatively superior e.g. in learning, flexibility and robustness - suggesting to try to…
Although artificial neural networks are often described as brain-inspired, their representations typically rely on continuous activations, such as the continuous latent variables in variational autoencoders (VAEs), which limits their…
Deep generative models are reported to be useful in broad applications including image generation. Repeated inference between data space and latent space in these models can denoise cluttered images and improve the quality of inferred…
Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) have developed into useful tools for probabilistic modelling due to recent advances in variational inference enabling large scale BNNs. However, BNNs remain brittle and hard to train, especially: (1) when…
Recent progress in variational inference has paid much attention to the flexibility of variational posteriors. One promising direction is to use implicit distributions, i.e., distributions without tractable densities as the variational…
As one of the most popular generative models, Variational Autoencoder (VAE) approximates the posterior of latent variables based on amortized variational inference. However, when the decoder network is sufficiently expressive, VAE may lead…
Inference in both brains and machines can be formalized by optimizing a shared objective: maximizing the evidence lower bound (ELBO) in machine learning, or minimizing variational free energy (F) in neuroscience (ELBO = -F). While this…
Variable selection and classification are common objectives in the analysis of high-dimensional data. Most such methods make distributional assumptions that may not be compatible with the diverse families of distributions data can take. A…
Inference in discrete graphical models with variational methods is difficult because of the inability to re-parameterize gradients of the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO). Many sampling-based methods have been proposed for estimating these…
The brain is believed to implement probabilistic reasoning and to represent information via population, or distributed, coding. Most previous population-based probabilistic (PPC) theories share several basic properties: 1) continuous-valued…
Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is widely used as a generative model to approximate a model's posterior on latent variables by combining the amortized variational inference and deep neural networks. However, when paired with strong…
Modeling uncertainty in deep neural networks, despite recent important advances, is still an open problem. Bayesian neural networks are a powerful solution, where the prior over network weights is a design choice, often a normal…
The current paper proposes a novel variational Bayes predictive coding RNN model, which can learn to generate fluctuated temporal patterns from exemplars. The model learns to maximize the lower bound of the weighted sum of the…
Higher order artificial neurons whose outputs are computed by applying an activation function to a higher order multinomial function of the inputs have been considered in the past, but did not gain acceptance due to the extra parameters and…
Learning probability distributions on the weights of neural networks (NNs) has recently proven beneficial in many applications. Bayesian methods, such as Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD), offer an elegant framework to reason about…
Diffusion probabilistic models have achieved mainstream success in many generative modeling tasks, from image generation to inverse problem solving. A distinct feature of these models is that they correspond to deep hierarchical latent…
Mechanistic models of single-neuron dynamics have been extensively studied in computational neuroscience. However, identifying which models can quantitatively reproduce empirically measured data has been challenging. We propose to overcome…
Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have been used extensively and with increasing success to model various types of sequential data. Much of this progress has been achieved through devising recurrent units and architectures with the…
Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) extend traditional neural networks to provide uncertainties associated with their outputs. On the forward pass through a BNN, predictions (and their uncertainties) are made either by Monte Carlo sampling…
Neural-network models of high-level brain functions such as memory recall and reasoning often rely on the presence of stochasticity. The majority of these models assumes that each neuron in the functional network is equipped with its own…