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Alexander Immer

20 accepted papers

2025

Influence Functions for Scalable Data Attribution in Diffusion Models

ICLR 2025oral

Diffusion models have led to significant advancements in generative modelling. Yet their widespread adoption poses challenges regarding data attribution and interpretability. In this paper, we aim to help address such challenges in diffusion models by extending influence functions. Influence functio…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2025

ZAPBench: A Benchmark for Whole-Brain Activity Prediction in Zebrafish

ICLR 2025spotlight

Data-driven benchmarks have led to significant progress in key scientific modeling domains including weather and structural biology. Here, we introduce the Zebrafish Activity Prediction Benchmark (ZAPBench) to measure progress on the problem of predicting cellular-resolution neural activity througho…

2024

Improving Neural Additive Models with Bayesian Principles

ICML 2024poster

Neural additive models (NAMs) enhance the transparency of deep neural networks by handling input features in separate additive sub-networks. However, they lack inherent mechanisms that provide calibrated uncertainties and enable selection of relevant features and interactions. Approaching NAMs from…

2024

Position: Bayesian Deep Learning is Needed in the Age of Large-Scale AI

ICML 2024poster

In the current landscape of deep learning research, there is a predominant emphasis on achieving high predictive accuracy in supervised tasks involving large image and language datasets. However, a broader perspective reveals a multitude of overlooked metrics, tasks, and data types, such as uncertai…

Cited by 36SourcePDFScholar
2024

Shaving Weights with Occam's Razor: Bayesian Sparsification for Neural Networks using the Marginal Likelihood

NeurIPS 2024poster

Neural network sparsification is a promising avenue to save computational time and memory costs, especially in an age where many successful AI models are becoming too large to naively deploy on consumer hardware. While much work has focused on different weight pruning criteria, the overall sparsifia…

2024

Towards Training Without Depth Limits: Batch Normalization Without Gradient Explosion

ICLR 2024poster

Normalization layers are one of the key building blocks for deep neural networks. Several theoretical studies have shown that batch normalization improves the signal propagation, by avoiding the representations from becoming collinear across the layers. However, results on mean-field theory of batch…

2023

Effective Bayesian Heteroscedastic Regression with Deep Neural Networks

NeurIPS 2023poster

Flexibly quantifying both irreducible aleatoric and model-dependent epistemic uncertainties plays an important role for complex regression problems. While deep neural networks in principle can provide this flexibility and learn heteroscedastic aleatoric uncertainties through non-linear functions, re…

2023

Kronecker-Factored Approximate Curvature for Modern Neural Network Architectures

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

The core components of many modern neural network architectures, such as transformers, convolutional, or graph neural networks, can be expressed as linear layers with *weight-sharing*. Kronecker-Factored Approximate Curvature (K-FAC), a second-order optimisation method, has shown promise to speed up…

Cited by 55SourcePDFScholar
2023

Learning Layer-wise Equivariances Automatically using Gradients

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

Convolutions encode equivariance symmetries into neural networks leading to better generalisation performance. However, symmetries provide fixed hard constraints on the functions a network can represent, need to be specified in advance, and can not be adapted. Our goal is to allow flexible symmetry…

2023

On the Identifiability and Estimation of Causal Location-Scale Noise Models

ICML 2023poster

We study the class of location-scale or heteroscedastic noise models (LSNMs), in which the effect $Y$ can be written as a function of the cause $X$ and a noise source $N$ independent of $X$, which may be scaled by a positive function $g$ over the cause, i.e., $Y = f(X) + g(X)N$. Despite the generali…

2023

Stochastic Marginal Likelihood Gradients using Neural Tangent Kernels

ICML 2023poster

Selecting hyperparameters in deep learning greatly impacts its effectiveness but requires manual effort and expertise. Recent works show that Bayesian model selection with Laplace approximations can allow to optimize such hyperparameters just like standard neural network parameters using gradients a…

2022

Invariance Learning in Deep Neural Networks with Differentiable Laplace Approximations

NeurIPS 2022accept

Data augmentation is commonly applied to improve performance of deep learning by enforcing the knowledge that certain transformations on the input preserve the output. Currently, the data augmentation parameters are chosen by human effort and costly cross-validation, which makes it cumbersome to app…

2022

Probing as Quantifying Inductive Bias

ACL 2022long

Pre-trained contextual representations have led to dramatic performance improvements on a range of downstream tasks. Such performance improvements have motivated researchers to quantify and understand the linguistic information encoded in these representations. In general, researchers quantify the a…

2021

Improving predictions of Bayesian neural nets via local linearization

AISTATS 2021poster

The generalized Gauss-Newton (GGN) approximation is often used to make practical Bayesian deep learning approaches scalable by replacing a second order derivative with a product of first order derivatives. In this paper we argue that the GGN approximation should be understood as a local linearizatio…

2021

Laplace Redux - Effortless Bayesian Deep Learning

NeurIPS 2021poster

Bayesian formulations of deep learning have been shown to have compelling theoretical properties and offer practical functional benefits, such as improved predictive uncertainty quantification and model selection. The Laplace approximation (LA) is a classic, and arguably the simplest family of appro…

Cited by 392SourcePDFScholar
2021

Scalable Marginal Likelihood Estimation for Model Selection in Deep Learning

ICML 2021spotlight

Marginal-likelihood based model-selection, even though promising, is rarely used in deep learning due to estimation difficulties. Instead, most approaches rely on validation data, which may not be readily available. In this work, we present a scalable marginal-likelihood estimation method to select…

2020

Continual Deep Learning by Functional Regularisation of Memorable Past

NeurIPS 2020oral

Continually learning new skills is important for intelligent systems, yet standard deep learning methods suffer from catastrophic forgetting of the past. Recent works address this with weight regularisation. Functional regularisation, although computationally expensive, is expected to perform better…

2019

Approximate Inference Turns Deep Networks into Gaussian Processes

NeurIPS 2019poster

Deep neural networks (DNN) and Gaussian processes (GP) are two powerful models with several theoretical connections relating them, but the relationship between their training methods is not well understood. In this paper, we show that certain Gaussian posterior approximations for Bayesian DNNs are e…

2019

Efficient learning of smooth probability functions from Bernoulli tests with guarantees

ICML 2019oral

We study the fundamental problem of learning an unknown, smooth probability function via point-wise Bernoulli tests. We provide a scalable algorithm for efficiently solving this problem with rigorous guarantees. In particular, we prove the convergence rate of our posterior update rule to the true pr…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar