← Search

Sebastian W Ober

10 accepted papers

2026

A Unification of Discrete, Gaussian, and Simplicial Diffusion

ICLR 2026poster

To model discrete sequences such as DNA, proteins, and language using diffusion, practitioners must choose between three major methods: diffusion in discrete space, Gaussian diffusion in Euclidean space, or diffusion on the simplex. Despite their shared goal, these models have disparate algorithms,…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Return of the Latent Space COWBOYS: Re-thinking the use of VAEs for Bayesian Optimisation of Structured Spaces

ICML 2025spotlight

Bayesian optimisation in the latent space of a VAE is a powerful framework for optimisation tasks over complex structured domains, such as the space of valid molecules. However, existing approaches tightly couple the surrogate and generative models, which can lead to suboptimal performance when the…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2023

An improved variational approximate posterior for the deep Wishart process

UAI 2023poster

Deep kernel processes are a recently introduced class of deep Bayesian models that have the flexibility of neural networks, but work entirely with Gram matrices. They operate by alternately sampling a Gram matrix from a distribution over positive semi-definite matrices, and applying a deterministic…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2023

Inducing Point Allocation for Sparse Gaussian Processes in High-Throughput Bayesian Optimisation

AISTATS 2023poster

Sparse Gaussian processes are a key component of high-throughput Bayesian optimisation (BO) loops; however, we show that existing methods for allocating their inducing points severely hamper optimisation performance. By exploiting the quality-diversity decomposition of determinantal point processes,…

2022

Bayesian Neural Network Priors Revisited

ICLR 2022poster

Isotropic Gaussian priors are the de facto standard for modern Bayesian neural network inference. However, it is unclear whether these priors accurately reflect our true beliefs about the weight distributions or give optimal performance. To find better priors, we study summary statistics of neural n…

2022

Last Layer Marginal Likelihood for Invariance Learning

AISTATS 2022poster

Data augmentation is often used to incorporate inductive biases into models. Traditionally, these are hand-crafted and tuned with cross validation. The Bayesian paradigm for model selection provides a path towards end-to-end learning of invariances using only the training data, by optimising the mar…

2021

A variational approximate posterior for the deep Wishart process

NeurIPS 2021poster

Recent work introduced deep kernel processes as an entirely kernel-based alternative to NNs (Aitchison et al. 2020). Deep kernel processes flexibly learn good top-layer representations by alternately sampling the kernel from a distribution over positive semi-definite matrices and performing nonlinea…

2021

Global inducing point variational posteriors for Bayesian neural networks and deep Gaussian processes

ICML 2021spotlight

We consider the optimal approximate posterior over the top-layer weights in a Bayesian neural network for regression, and show that it exhibits strong dependencies on the lower-layer weights. We adapt this result to develop a correlated approximate posterior over the weights at all layers in a Bayes…