No abstract

We introduce the Convolutional Conditional Neural Process (CONVCNP), a new member of the Neural Process family that models translation equivariance in the data. Translation equivariance is an important inductive bias for many learning problems including time series modelling, spatial data, and images. The model embeds data sets into an infinite-dimensional function space as opposed to a finitedimensional vector space. To formalize this notion, we extend the theory of neural representations of sets to include functional representations, and demonstrate that any translation-equivariant embedding can be represented using a convolutional deep set. We evaluate CONVCNPs in several settings, demonstrating that they achieve state-of-the-art performance compared to existing NPs. We demonstrate that building in translation equivariance enables zero-shot generalization to challenging, out-of-domain tasks.

The Chernoff bound is a well-known tool for obtaining a high probability bound on the expectation of a Bernoulli random variable in terms of its sample average. This bound is commonly used in statistical learning theory to upper bound the generalisation risk of a hypothesis in terms of its empirical risk on held-out data, for the case of a binary-valued loss function. However, the extension of this bound to the case of random variables taking values in the unit interval is less well known in the community. In this note we provide a proof of this extension for convenience and future reference.