Hi-fi functional priors by learning activations

Function-space priors in Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) provide a more intuitive approach to embedding beliefs directly into the model's output, thereby enhancing regularization, uncertainty quantification, and risk-aware decision-making. However, imposing function-space priors on BNNs is challenging. We address this task through optimization techniques that explore how trainable activations can accommodate higher-complexity priors and match intricate target function distributions. We investigate flexible activation models, including Pade functions and piecewise linear functions, and discuss the learning challenges related to identifiability, loss construction, and symmetries. Our empirical findings indicate that even BNNs with a single wide hidden layer when equipped with flexible trainable activation, can effectively achieve desired function-space priors.

High-Fidelity Transfer of Functional Priors for Wide Bayesian Neural Networks by Learning Activations

Function-space priors in Bayesian Neural Networks provide a more intuitive approach to embedding beliefs directly into the model's output, thereby enhancing regularization, uncertainty quantification, and risk-aware decision-making. However, imposing function-space priors on BNNs is challenging. We address this task through optimization techniques that explore how trainable activations can accommodate complex priors and match intricate target function distributions. We discuss critical learning challenges, including identifiability, loss construction, and symmetries that arise in this context. Furthermore, we enable evidence maximization to facilitate model selection by conditioning the functional priors on additional hyperparameters. Our empirical findings demonstrate that even BNNs with a single wide hidden layer, when equipped with these adaptive trainable activations and conditioning strategies, can effectively achieve high-fidelity function-space priors, providing a robust and flexible framework for enhancing Bayesian neural network performance.

Automatic Classification of Games using Support Vector Machine

Game developers benefit from availability of custom game genres when doing game market analysis. This information can help them to spot opportunities in market and make them more successful in planning a new game. In this paper we find good classifier for predicting category of a game. Prediction is based on description and title of a game. We use 2443 iOS App Store games as data set to generate a document-term matrix. To reduce the curse of dimensionality we use Latent Semantic Indexing, which, reduces the term dimension to approximately 1/9. Support Vector Machine supervised learning model is fit to pre-processed data. Model parameters are optimized using grid search and 20-fold cross validation. Best model yields to 77% mean accuracy or roughly 70% accuracy with 95% confidence. Developed classifier has been used in-house to assist games market research.