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Poster
Orthogonally Decoupled Variational Gaussian Processes
Hugh Salimbeni · Ching-An Cheng · Byron Boots · Marc Deisenroth

Wed Dec 05 07:45 AM -- 09:45 AM (PST) @ Room 210 #8
in Wed Poster Session A »

Gaussian processes (GPs) provide a powerful non-parametric framework for reasoning over functions. Despite appealing theory, its superlinear computational and memory complexities have presented a long-standing challenge. State-of-the-art sparse variational inference methods trade modeling accuracy against complexity. However, the complexities of these methods still scale superlinearly in the number of basis functions, implying that that sparse GP methods are able to learn from large datasets only when a small model is used. Recently, a decoupled approach was proposed that removes the unnecessary coupling between the complexities of modeling the mean and the covariance functions of a GP. It achieves a linear complexity in the number of mean parameters, so an expressive posterior mean function can be modeled. While promising, this approach suffers from optimization difficulties due to ill-conditioning and non-convexity. In this work, we propose an alternative decoupled parametrization. It adopts an orthogonal basis in the mean function to model the residues that cannot be learned by the standard coupled approach. Therefore, our method extends, rather than replaces, the coupled approach to achieve strictly better performance. This construction admits a straightforward natural gradient update rule, so the structure of the information manifold that is lost during decoupling can be leveraged to speed up learning. Empirically, our algorithm demonstrates significantly faster convergence in multiple experiments.

Keywords: Variational Inference · Gaussian Processes
[ Paper] 

Author Information

Hugh Salimbeni (Imperial College London)
Ching-An Cheng (Georgia Tech)
Byron Boots (Georgia Tech / Google Brain)
Marc Deisenroth (Imperial College London)
Marc Deisenroth

Professor Marc Deisenroth is the DeepMind Chair in Artificial Intelligence at University College London and the Deputy Director of UCL's Centre for Artificial Intelligence. He also holds a visiting faculty position at the University of Johannesburg and Imperial College London. Marc's research interests center around data-efficient machine learning, probabilistic modeling and autonomous decision making. Marc was Program Chair of EWRL 2012, Workshops Chair of RSS 2013, EXPO-Co-Chair of ICML 2020, and Tutorials Co-Chair of NeurIPS 2021. In 2019, Marc co-organized the Machine Learning Summer School in London. He received Paper Awards at ICRA 2014, ICCAS 2016, and ICML 2020. He is co-author of the book [Mathematics for Machine Learning](https://mml-book.github.io) published by Cambridge University Press (2020).

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