Previous talks at the SCCS Colloquium

Hanna Weigold: Second Order Optimization Methods for Bayesian Neural Networks

SCCS Colloquium |


Deep Learning models are commonly used for a huge variety of applications, notably in safety-critical fields such as autonomous driving and medical image processing, where reliable uncertainty estimations are crucial. In contrast to frequentist approaches to deep learning, Bayesian Neural Networks provide a framework to assess uncertainty in the training data. However, since BNNs incorporate a multiple of the weights of a frequentist Neural Network with comparable architecture, there is a high demand for efficient optimizers. Under certain conditions, second order optimizers offer a faster convergence rate than gradient descent and are able to profit from parallelized computing architectures. In this work, a Quasi-Newton method is used to train several types of Bayesian Neural Networks and its performance is compared to the most commonly used first order optimizers.

Master's thesis talk (Mathematics in Science and Engineering). Hanna is advised by Severin Reiz and Ivana Jovanovic Buha.