Theoretical and Practical Advances in Hierarchical Bayesian Deep Learning Methodology

Neil K. Chada, Simon Cotter, Kody J. H. Law, Xinzhu Liang

Reliable uncertainty quantification remains an important challenge in AI. Hierarchical Bayesian methods provide a principled framework for this by representing unknown quantities through posterior distributions. Joint inference of neural-network parameters and prior hyperparameters is challenging for conventional Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods due to strong dependencies. In this work, we introduce the multilevel particle marginal Metropolis-Hastings (MLPMMH) method, which combines pseudo-marginal inference for the hyperparameters with coupled sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) across hierarchy of network-width truncations for conditional parameter inference. The hierarchy is induced by a trace-class neural network (TNN) prior with width-dependent decay, motivated empirically by the compressible structure observed in trained neural-network parameters. Under standard multilevel coupling assumptions, we establish that MLPMMH achieves mean-square error (MSE) $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^2)$ at expected computational cost $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-2})$, and verify the predicted rate on a Bayesian regression problem. To address larger-scale applications, we further introduce S-MLPMMH,…