Technical Program

Paper Detail

Paper: PS-2B.16
Session: Poster Session 2B
Location: H Fläche 1.OG
Session Time: Sunday, September 15, 17:15 - 20:15
Presentation Time:Sunday, September 15, 17:15 - 20:15
Presentation: Poster
Publication: 2019 Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience, 13-16 September 2019, Berlin, Germany
Paper Title: Uncertainty through Sampling: The Correspondence of Monte Carlo Dropout and Spiking in Artificial Neural Networks
Manuscript:  Click here to view manuscript
License: Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.32470/CCN.2019.1215-0
Authors: Kai Standvoss, Radboud University, Netherlands; Lukas Grossberger, Bosch GmbH, Germany
Abstract: Any organism that senses its environment only has an incomplete and noisy perspective on the world, which creates a necessity for nervous systems to represent uncertainty. While the principles of encoding uncertainty in biological neural ensembles are still under investigation, deep learning became a popular and effective machine learning method. In these models, sampling through dropout has been proposed as a mechanism to encode uncertainty. Moreover, dropout has previously been linked to variability in spiking networks under specific assumptions. We compare the relationship between dropout and spiking neuron models by means of the variation ratio over their output. We demonstrate that in cases of incomplete world knowledge (epistemic uncertainty) as well as for noisy observations (aleatoric uncertainty) both neuron models show similar uncertainty representations. These findings provide evidence that sampling could play a fundamental role in representing uncertainties in neural systems.