Variational Neural Networks

Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) provide a tool to estimate the uncertainty of a neural network by considering a distribution over weights and sampling different models for each input. In this paper, we propose a method for uncertainty estimation in neural networks called Variational Neural Network that, instead of considering a distribution over weights, generates parameters for the output distribution of a layer by transforming its inputs with learnable sub-layers. In uncertainty quality estimation experiments, we show that VNNs achieve better uncertainty quality than Monte Carlo Dropout or Bayes By Backpropagation methods.