改进序列建模的不确定性量化,提升决策任务表现。
Architectural and Inferential Inductive Biases For Exchangeable Sequence Modeling
- 采用多步自回归推理,更好区分认知与随机不确定性。
- 发现现有Transformer架构无法保证交换性,导致性能下降。
- 适合从事贝叶斯推断、主动学习等决策相关研究者阅读。
自回归模型已成为建模可交换序列(在某些潜在因子条件下为独立同分布观测)的强大框架,能够直接从缺失数据中建模不确定性(而非通过潜在变量)。鉴于后验推断在决策任务(如主动学习、赌博机)中的关键作用,本文研究了在可交换序列建模中最具有效果的推断与架构归纳偏置。针对推断阶段,我们指出当前主流的单步生成方法存在根本缺陷:无法区分认知不确定性与随机不确定性。相反,贝叶斯统计领域长期倡导的多步自回归生成方法能实现更优的不确定性量化,并显著提升下游决策任务性能。这引出下一个问题:哪些架构最适合多步推断?我们发现近期提出的用于可交换序列的Transformer架构(Muller et al., 2022;Nguyen & Grover, 2022;Ye & Namkoong, 2024)存在微妙但重要的缺陷——尽管引入了显著计算开销,却无法保证交换性。我们在受控合成设置中验证了这一发现,表明定制架构可能远低于标准因果掩码的表现,凸显了新型架构创新的必要性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Autoregressive models have emerged as a powerful framework for modeling exchangeable sequences - i.i.d. observations when conditioned on some latent factor - enabling direct modeling of uncertainty from missing data (rather than a latent). Motivated by the critical role posterior inference plays as a subroutine in decision-making (e.g., active learning, bandits), we study the inferential and architectural inductive biases that are most effective for exchangeable sequence modeling. For the inference stage, we highlight a fundamental limitation of the prevalent single-step generation approach: inability to distinguish between epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty. Instead, a long line of works in Bayesian statistics advocates for multi-step autoregressive generation; we demonstrate this "correct approach" enables superior uncertainty quantification that translates into better performance on downstream decision-making tasks. This naturally leads to the next question: which architectures are best suited for multi-step inference? We identify a subtle yet important gap between recently proposed Transformer architectures for exchangeable sequences (Muller et al., 2022; Nguyen & Grover, 2022; Ye & Namkoong, 2024), and prove that they in fact cannot guarantee exchangeability despite introducing significant computational overhead. We illustrate our findings using controlled synthetic settings, demonstrating how custom architectures can significantly underperform standard causal masks, underscoring the need for new architectural innovations.
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