Promises and Pitfalls of the Linearized Laplace in Bayesian Optimization
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The linearized-Laplace approximation (LLA) has been shown to be effective and efficient in constructing Bayesian neural networks. It is theoretically compelling since it can be seen as a Gaussian process posterior with the mean function given by the neural network's maximum-a-posteriori predictive function and the covariance function induced by the empirical neural tangent kernel. However, while its efficacy has been studied in large-scale tasks like image classification, it has not been studied in sequential decision-making problems like Bayesian optimization where Gaussian processes -- with simple mean functions and kernels such as the radial basis function -- are the de-facto surrogate models. In this work, we study the usefulness of the LLA in Bayesian optimization and highlight its strong performance and flexibility. However, we also present some pitfalls that might arise and a potential problem with the LLA when the search space is unbounded.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it