Gaussian Neural Networks

Peter Kuhn, Victoria Heusinger-Heß

Gaussian neural networks (GaNNs) are proposed as a novel regularization mechanism for neural networks. From a Bayesian perspective standard regularization techniques can be viewed as imposing priors over weight-space. Assuming priors over activation-space remains a largely unexplored possibility. GaNNs assume such priors. They do this by treating activities from earlier layers like signals with Gaussian noise and predicting the properties of the noise distribution using an additional unsupervised loss. While training, the unsupervised loss acts as a penalty on unexpected activities, allowing greater weight updates in less surprising directions. The paper demonstrates the superiority of Gaussian neural networks over standard neural networks on a variety of classification and regression tasks. We also investigate the ability of GaNNs to quantify uncertainty.