Papers › Bayesian Low-Rank LeArning (Bella): A Practical Approach to Bayesian Neural Networks

Bayesian Low-Rank LeArning (Bella): A Practical Approach to Bayesian Neural Networks

30 Jul 2024arXiv:2407.20891archive 2025-07-28

Bao Gia Doan, Afshar Shamsi, Xiao-Yu Guo, Arash Mohammadi, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Dino Sejdinovic, Damien Teney, Damith C. Ranasinghe, Ehsan Abbasnejad

Computational complexity of Bayesian learning is impeding its adoption in practical, large-scale tasks. Despite demonstrations of significant merits such as improved robustness and resilience to unseen or out-of-distribution inputs over their non- Bayesian counterparts, their practical use has faded to near insignificance. In this study, we introduce an innovative framework to mitigate the computational burden of Bayesian neural networks (BNNs). Our approach follows the principle of Bayesian techniques based on deep ensembles, but significantly reduces their cost via multiple low-rank perturbations of parameters arising from a pre-trained neural network. Both vanilla version of ensembles as well as more sophisticated schemes such as Bayesian learning with Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD), previously deemed impractical for large models, can be seamlessly implemented within the proposed framework, called Bayesian Low-Rank LeArning (Bella). In a nutshell, i) Bella achieves a dramatic reduction in the number of trainable parameters required to approximate a Bayesian posterior; and ii) it not only maintains, but in some instances, surpasses the performance of conventional Bayesian learning methods and non-Bayesian baselines. Our results with large-scale tasks such as ImageNet, CAMELYON17, DomainNet, VQA with CLIP, LLaVA demonstrate the effectiveness and versatility of Bella in building highly scalable and practical Bayesian deep models for real-world applications.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

afsharshamsi/bella officialmentioned in paperpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

CLIP

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections