TY - JOUR
T1 - Task-agnostic amortized inference of gaussian process hyperparameters
AU - Liu, Sulin
AU - Sun, Xingyuan
AU - Ramadge, Peter J.
AU - Adams, Ryan P.
N1 - Funding Information:
We would like to thank Yucen Luo and members of the Princeton Laboratory for Intelligent Probabilistic Systems for valuable discussions and feedback. Funding: This work was partially funded by NSF IIS-2007278 and a Princeton SEAS Innovation Grant. Other financial interests: RPA is on the board of directors at Cambridge Machines Ltd. and a scientific advisor to Manifold Bio.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Neural information processing systems foundation. All rights reserved.
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - Gaussian processes (GPs) are flexible priors for modeling functions. However, their success depends on the kernel accurately reflecting the properties of the data. One of the appeals of the GP framework is that the marginal likelihood of the kernel hyperparameters is often available in closed form, enabling optimization and sampling procedures to fit these hyperparameters to data. Unfortunately, point-wise evaluation of the marginal likelihood is expensive due to the need to solve a linear system; searching or sampling the space of hyperparameters thus often dominates the practical cost of using GPs. We introduce an approach to the identification of kernel hyperparameters in GP regression and related problems that sidesteps the need for costly marginal likelihoods. Our strategy is to “amortize” inference over hyperparameters by training a single neural network, which consumes a set of regression data and produces an estimate of the kernel function, useful across different tasks. To accommodate the varying dimension and cardinality of different regression problems, we use a hierarchical self-attention-based neural network that produces estimates of the hyperparameters which are invariant to the order of the input data points and data dimensions. We show that a single neural model trained on synthetic data is able to generalize directly to several different unseen real-world GP use cases. Our experiments demonstrate that the estimated hyperparameters are comparable in quality to those from the conventional model selection procedures, while being much faster to obtain, significantly accelerating GP regression and its related applications such as Bayesian optimization and Bayesian quadrature. The code and pre-trained model are available at https://github.com/PrincetonLIPS/AHGP.
AB - Gaussian processes (GPs) are flexible priors for modeling functions. However, their success depends on the kernel accurately reflecting the properties of the data. One of the appeals of the GP framework is that the marginal likelihood of the kernel hyperparameters is often available in closed form, enabling optimization and sampling procedures to fit these hyperparameters to data. Unfortunately, point-wise evaluation of the marginal likelihood is expensive due to the need to solve a linear system; searching or sampling the space of hyperparameters thus often dominates the practical cost of using GPs. We introduce an approach to the identification of kernel hyperparameters in GP regression and related problems that sidesteps the need for costly marginal likelihoods. Our strategy is to “amortize” inference over hyperparameters by training a single neural network, which consumes a set of regression data and produces an estimate of the kernel function, useful across different tasks. To accommodate the varying dimension and cardinality of different regression problems, we use a hierarchical self-attention-based neural network that produces estimates of the hyperparameters which are invariant to the order of the input data points and data dimensions. We show that a single neural model trained on synthetic data is able to generalize directly to several different unseen real-world GP use cases. Our experiments demonstrate that the estimated hyperparameters are comparable in quality to those from the conventional model selection procedures, while being much faster to obtain, significantly accelerating GP regression and its related applications such as Bayesian optimization and Bayesian quadrature. The code and pre-trained model are available at https://github.com/PrincetonLIPS/AHGP.
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M3 - Conference article
AN - SCOPUS:85108453240
SN - 1049-5258
VL - 2020-December
JO - Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems
JF - Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems
T2 - 34th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2020
Y2 - 6 December 2020 through 12 December 2020
ER -