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arXiv · 2007.00767

NP-PROV: Neural Processes with Position-Relevant-Only Variances

Xuesong Wang·Lina Yao·Xianzhi Wang·Feiping Nie
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Abstract

Neural Processes (NPs) families encode distributions over functions to a latent representation, given context data, and decode posterior mean and variance at unknown locations. Since mean and variance are derived from the same latent space, they may fail on out-of-domain tasks where fluctuations in function values amplify the model uncertainty. We present a new member named Neural Processes with Position-Relevant-Only Variances (NP-PROV). NP-PROV hypothesizes that a target point close to a context point has small uncertainty, regardless of the function value at that position. The resulting approach derives mean and variance from a function-value-related space and a position-related-only latent space separately. Our evaluation on synthetic and real-world datasets reveals that NP-PROV can achieve state-of-the-art likelihood while retaining a bounded variance when drifts exist in the function value.

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Xuesong Wang, Lina Yao, Xianzhi Wang, Feiping Nie. 2020-06-15. NP-PROV: Neural Processes with Position-Relevant-Only Variances. https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.00767

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