{"paper":{"title":"On the Expressiveness of Approximate Inference in Bayesian Neural Networks","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.LG"],"primary_cat":"stat.ML","authors_text":"Andrew Y. K. Foong, David R. Burt, Richard E. Turner, Yingzhen Li","submitted_at":"2019-09-02T13:54:39Z","abstract_excerpt":"While Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) hold the promise of being flexible, well-calibrated statistical models, inference often requires approximations whose consequences are poorly understood. We study the quality of common variational methods in approximating the Bayesian predictive distribution. For single-hidden layer ReLU BNNs, we prove a fundamental limitation in function-space of two of the most commonly used distributions defined in weight-space: mean-field Gaussian and Monte Carlo dropout. We find there are simple cases where neither method can have substantially increased uncertainty i"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"1909.00719","kind":"arxiv","version":4},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/1909.00719/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}