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Presentation
Extended Variational Inference for Propagating Uncertainty in Convolutional Neural Networks
International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing (2019)
  • Dimah Dera, Rowan University
  • Ghulam Rasool, Rowan University
  • Nidhal Bouaynaya, Rowan University
Abstract
Model confidence or uncertainty is critical in autonomous systems as they directly tie to the safety and trustworthiness of the system. The quantification of uncertainty in the output decisions of deep neural networks (DNNs) is a challenging problem. The Bayesian framework enables the estimation of the predictive uncertainty by introducing probability distributions over the (unknown) network weights; however, the propagation of these high-dimensional distributions through multiple layers and non-linear transformations is mathematically intractable. In this work, we propose an extended variational inference (eVI) framework for convolutional neural network (CNN) based on tensor Normal distributions (TNDs) defined over convolutional kernels. Our proposed eVI framework propagates the first two moments (mean and covariance) of these TNDs through all layers of the CNN. We employ first-order Taylor series linearization to approximate the mean and covariances passing through the non-linear activations. The uncertainty in the output decision is given by the propagated covariance of the predictive distribution. Furthermore, we show, through extensive simulations on the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets, that the CNN becomes more robust to Gaussian noise and adversarial attacks.
Publication Date
October 24, 2019
Location
Pittsburgh, PA, USA
DOI
10.1109/MLSP.2019.8918747
Citation Information
Dimah Dera, Ghulam Rasool and Nidhal Bouaynaya. "Extended Variational Inference for Propagating Uncertainty in Convolutional Neural Networks" International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing (2019) p. 8918747
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/nidhal-bouaynaya/36/