Scalable Vector Gaussian Information Bottleneck
This work addresses the need for adaptable accuracy-complexity trade-offs in machine learning applications, representing an incremental advancement in information bottleneck methods.
The paper tackles the problem of balancing accuracy and generalization in statistical learning by introducing a scalable information bottleneck method that outputs multiple descriptions with varying feature richness, and demonstrates improved generalization on the MNIST dataset.
In the context of statistical learning, the Information Bottleneck method seeks a right balance between accuracy and generalization capability through a suitable tradeoff between compression complexity, measured by minimum description length, and distortion evaluated under logarithmic loss measure. In this paper, we study a variation of the problem, called scalable information bottleneck, in which the encoder outputs multiple descriptions of the observation with increasingly richer features. The model, which is of successive-refinement type with degraded side information streams at the decoders, is motivated by some application scenarios that require varying levels of accuracy depending on the allowed (or targeted) level of complexity. We establish an analytic characterization of the optimal relevance-complexity region for vector Gaussian sources. Then, we derive a variational inference type algorithm for general sources with unknown distribution; and show means of parametrizing it using neural networks. Finally, we provide experimental results on the MNIST dataset which illustrate that the proposed method generalizes better to unseen data during the training phase.