BlackHC's Adventures

In information theory, the data processing inequality (DPI) is a powerful concept. Informally, it tells us that processing data cannot increase the amount of contained information. In this two-part blog post, we will explore the DPI and its applications to function-space variational inference (FSVI). [Read More]

In this blog post, following the previous blog post1 on “Bayesian Appropriation: General Likelihood for Loss Functions”, we will examine and better understand parts of the paper “PACTran: PAC-Bayesian Metrics for Estimating the Transferability of Pretrained Models to Classification Tasks”2 (“PACTran”), which was presented as an oral at the ECCV... [Read More]

In this blog post, we explore how some losses could be rewritten as a Bayesian objective using ideas from variational inference—hence, the tongue-in-cheek “Bayesian Appropriation.” This can make it easier to see connections between loss functions and Bayesian methods (e.g. by spotting similar patterns in the wild). We will first provide... [Read More]

The Rao-Blackwell theorem is a fundamental theorem in statistics that offers a powerful method for improving estimators by conditioning on sufficient statistics. It is named after two statisticians, C.R. Rao and David Blackwell, who independently discovered it. The theorem is relevant in many areas of statistics, including machine learning algorithms... [Read More]

Software engineering is on the brink of a revolution with the emergence of large language models (LLMs). LLMs are AI systems that have been trained on large amounts of data, allowing them to generate natural language text and source code. [Read More]