Walking on the Fiber: A Simple Geometric Approximation for Bayesian Neural Networks

Abstract

Bayesian Neural Networks provide a principled framework for uncertainty quantification by modeling the posterior distribution of network parameters. However, exact posterior inference is computationally intractable, and widely used approximations like the Laplace method struggle with scalability and posterior accuracy in modern deep networks. In this work, we revisit sampling techniques for posterior exploration, proposing a simple variation tailored to efficiently sample from the posterior in over-parameterized networks by leveraging the low-dimensional structure of loss minima. Building on this, we introduce a model that learns a deformation of the parameter space, enabling rapid posterior sampling without requiring iterative methods. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive posterior approximations with improved scalability compared to recent refinement techniques. These contributions provide a practical alternative for Bayesian inference in deep learning.

Cite

Text

Reichlin et al. "Walking on the Fiber: A Simple Geometric Approximation for Bayesian Neural Networks." Transactions on Machine Learning Research, 2025.

Markdown

[Reichlin et al. "Walking on the Fiber: A Simple Geometric Approximation for Bayesian Neural Networks." Transactions on Machine Learning Research, 2025.](https://mlanthology.org/tmlr/2025/reichlin2025tmlr-walking/)

BibTeX

@article{reichlin2025tmlr-walking,
  title     = {{Walking on the Fiber: A Simple Geometric Approximation for Bayesian Neural Networks}},
  author    = {Reichlin, Alfredo and Vasco, Miguel and Kragic, Danica},
  journal   = {Transactions on Machine Learning Research},
  year      = {2025},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/tmlr/2025/reichlin2025tmlr-walking/}
}