Favour: FAst Variance Operator for Uncertainty Rating

Abstract: Bayesian Neural Networks (BNN) have emerged as a crucial approach for interpreting ML predictions. By sampling from the posterior distribution, data scientists may estimate the uncertainty of an inference. Unfortunately many inference samples are often needed, the overhead of which greatly hinder BNN's wide adoption. To mitigate this, previous work proposed propagating the first and second moments of the posterior directly through the network. However, on its own this method is even slower than sampling, so the propagated variance needs to be approximated such as assuming independence between neural nodes. The resulting trade-off between quality and inference time did not match even plain Monte Carlo sampling. Our contribution is a more principled variance propagation framework based on "spiked covariance matrices", which smoothly interpolates between quality and inference time. This is made possible by a new fast algorithm for updating a diagonal-plus-low-rank matrix approximation under various operations. We tested our algorithm against sampling based MC Dropout and Variational Inference on a number of downstream uncertainty themed tasks, such as calibration and out-of-distribution testing. We find that Favour is as fast as performing 2-3 inference samples, while matching the performance of 10-100 samples. In summary, this work enables the use of BNN in the realm of performance critical tasks where they have previously been out of reach.