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  • Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)

Incorporating Interpretable Output Constraints in Bayesian Neural Networks

By: Wanqian Yang, Lars Lorch, Moritz Graule, Himabindu Lakkaraju and Finale Doshi-Velez
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Abstract

Domains where supervised models are deployed often come with task-specific constraints, such as prior expert knowledge on the ground-truth function, or desiderata like safety and fairness. We introduce a novel probabilistic framework for reasoning with such constraints and formulate a prior that enables us to effectively incorporate them into Bayesian neural networks (BNNs), including a variant that can be amortized over tasks. The resulting Output-Constrained BNN (OC-BNN) is fully consistent with the Bayesian framework for uncertainty quantification and is amenable to black-box inference. Unlike typical BNN inference in uninterpretable parameter space, OC-BNNs widen the range of functional knowledge that can be incorporated, especially for model users without expertise in machine learning. We demonstrate the efficacy of OC-BNNs on real-world datasets, spanning multiple domains such as healthcare, criminal justice, and credit scoring.

Citation

Yang, Wanqian, Lars Lorch, Moritz Graule, Himabindu Lakkaraju, and Finale Doshi-Velez. "Incorporating Interpretable Output Constraints in Bayesian Neural Networks." Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 33 (2020).
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About The Author

Himabindu Lakkaraju

Technology and Operations Management
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More from the Authors
  • Fair Machine Unlearning: Data Removal while Mitigating Disparities By: Himabindu Lakkaraju, Flavio Calmon, Jiaqi Ma and Alex Oesterling
  • Quantifying Uncertainty in Natural Language Explanations of Large Language Models By: Himabindu Lakkaraju, Sree Harsha Tanneru and Chirag Agarwal
  • Post Hoc Explanations of Language Models Can Improve Language Models By: Satyapriya Krishna, Jiaqi Ma, Dylan Slack, Asma Ghandeharioun, Sameer Singh and Himabindu Lakkaraju
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