Attentive neural processes

Hyunjik Kim, Andriy Mnih, Jonathan Schwarz, Marta Garnelo, Ali Eslami, Dan Rosenbaum, Oriol Vinyals, Yee Whye Teh

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

Abstract

Neural Processes (NPs) (Garnelo et al., 2018a;b) approach regression by learning to map a context set of observed input-output pairs to a distribution over regression functions. Each function models the distribution of the output given an input, conditioned on the context. NPs have the benefit of fitting observed data efficiently with linear complexity in the number of context input-output pairs, and can learn a wide family of conditional distributions; they learn predictive distributions conditioned on context sets of arbitrary size. Nonetheless, we show that NPs suffer a fundamental drawback of underfitting, giving inaccurate predictions at the inputs of the observed data they condition on. We address this issue by incorporating attention into NPs, allowing each input location to attend to the relevant context points for the prediction. We show that this greatly improves the accuracy of predictions, results in noticeably faster training, and expands the range of functions that can be modelled.

Original languageEnglish
StatePublished - 2019
Externally publishedYes
Event7th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2019 - New Orleans, United States
Duration: 6 May 20199 May 2019

Conference

Conference7th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2019
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityNew Orleans
Period6/05/199/05/19

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 7th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2019. All Rights Reserved.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Education
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Language and Linguistics

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