Ordinary posterior contraction for heavy-tailed neural-network priors
Observe independent pairs $(X_i, Y_i)$, $i = 1, \dots, n$, with $$X_i \sim P_X, \qquad Y_i = f_0(X_i) + \varepsilon_i, \qquad \varepsilon_i \sim N(0,1),$$ where $P_X$ is a probability distribution on $[0,1]^d$ and the errors are independent of the design; the noise variance is known. Fix $\delta > 0$. Let $\Pi_n$ be the law of a fully connected ReLU network on $[0,1]^d$ with $L_n = \lceil (\log n)^{1+\delta} \rceil$ hidden layers, each of width $\lceil \sqrt{n} \rceil$, and an affine scalar output, whose weights and biases are independent copies of $\sigma_n Z$ with $\sigma_n = \exp\{-(\log n)^{2(1+\delta)}\}$. Here $Z$ has a density $h$ that is positive, bounded, symmetric and nonincreasing on $[0, \infty)$, and for some $c_1, c_2 > 0$ and $\kappa \ge 0$, $$\log\frac{1}{h(x)} \le c_1\bigl[1 + \{\log(1+x)\}^{1+\kappa}\bigr] \quad (x \ge 0), \qquad \int_x^\infty h(u)\,du \le \frac{c_2}{x} \quad (x \ge 1);$$ Cauchy densities are an example. Suppose that $f_0 = g_q \circ \cdots \circ g_0$ lies in the compositional Hölder class $\mathcal{G}(q, \mathbf{d}, \mathbf{t}, \boldsymbol{\beta}, K)$ of Schmidt-Hieber: $d_0 = d$, $d_{q+1} = 1$, each $g_i$ maps $[a_i, b_i]^{d_i}$ into $[a_{i+1}, b_{i+1}]^{d_{i+1}}$ with $|a_i|, |b_i| \le K$, and each coordinate of $g_i$ depends on at most $t_i \le d_i$ of its variables and has $\beta_i$-Hölder norm at most $K$ (derivatives up to order $\lceil \beta_i \rceil - 1$, the last of them Hölder of order $\beta_i - \lceil \beta_i \rceil + 1$). Set $$\beta_i^* = \beta_i \prod_{j=i+1}^{q} \min(\beta_j, 1), \qquad \gamma = 2(1+\delta)(1+\kappa) + 1, \qquad \phi_n = \max_{0 \le i \le q} \Bigl(\frac{(\log n)^{\gamma}}{n}\Bigr)^{\beta_i^*/(2\beta_i^* + t_i)}.$$ For fixed $B > \|f_0\|_\infty$ let $C_B(f)(x) = \max(-B, \min(B, f(x)))$.
Castillo and Egels proved that for every $\alpha \in (0,1)$ the tempered posterior, in which the Gaussian likelihood is raised to the power $\alpha$, satisfies the conclusion below for $M$ large enough, and that the ordinary posterior does too when the prior is augmented by a suitable Gamma prior on the noise variance. They note that for heavy-tailed series priors in the Gaussian white noise model, the corresponding result for the ordinary posterior was shown by Agapiou and Castillo.
Problem. For every such model and prior, is there a constant $M > 0$ independent of $n$ such that $$\mathbb{E}_{f_0} \Pi_n\bigl(\|C_B(f) - f_0\|_{L^2(P_X)} > M \phi_n \bigm| X, Y\bigr) \longrightarrow 0 \qquad (n \to \infty),$$ where $\Pi_n(\cdot \mid X, Y)$ is the ordinary posterior, $$d\Pi_n(f \mid X, Y) \propto \exp\Bigl[-\frac{1}{2} \sum_{i=1}^{n} \bigl(Y_i - f(X_i)\bigr)^2\Bigr]\, d\Pi_n(f)?$$ The clipping $C_B$ is applied to posterior draws; the likelihood uses the unclipped network output.
Source: Castillo and Egels (2025), Sections 3.8 and 4.6, who conjecture that their results hold for the ordinary posterior without a prior on the noise variance; stated for compositional regression with a common weight scaling by AIM — Open Applied Problems.
Imported from github.com/MColbrook/AIM.
Classification
- Primary
- ST — Statistics Theory
- Secondary
- PR
- Keywords
- AIM Open Applied Problems, Bayesian neural networks, heavy-tailed priors, posterior contraction
References
@article{castillo2025,
author = {Castillo, Isma{\"e}l and Egels, Paul},
title = {Posterior and variational inference for deep neural networks with heavy-tailed weights},
journal = {J. Mach. Learn. Res.},
volume = {26},
number = {122},
year = {2025},
pages = {1--58},
url = {https://www.jmlr.org/papers/v26/24-0894.html},
eprint = {2406.03369},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
}
@article{schmidthieber2020,
author = {Schmidt-Hieber, Johannes},
title = {Nonparametric regression using deep neural networks with {ReLU} activation function},
journal = {Ann. Statist.},
volume = {48},
number = {4},
year = {2020},
pages = {1875--1897},
doi = {10.1214/19-AOS1875},
eprint = {1708.06633},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
}
@article{agapiou2024,
author = {Agapiou, Sergios and Castillo, Isma{\"e}l},
title = {Heavy-tailed {B}ayesian nonparametric adaptation},
journal = {Ann. Statist.},
volume = {52},
number = {4},
year = {2024},
pages = {1433--1459},
doi = {10.1214/24-AOS2397},
eprint = {2308.04916},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
}
@misc{aim-heavy-tailed-network-ordinary-posterior,
author = {Brunton, Steve and Colbrook, Matthew J. and de Hoop, Maarten V. and Stepaniants, George and Townsend, Alex and Ward, Rachel},
title = {{Ordinary posterior contraction for heavy-tailed neural-network priors}},
howpublished = {AIM --- Open Applied Problems, GitHub repository},
year = {2026},
url = {https://github.com/MColbrook/AIM/blob/a153f469ee0ea64e876b2ad97c79d252c19a3e22/problems/549-heavy-tailed-network-ordinary-posterior.md},
note = {Entry 549 at commit a153f46, 2026-10-13},
}
Citing this problem
This identifier is permanent. It will not change if the problem is solved, reclassified or withdrawn.
OP-00288, "Ordinary posterior contraction for heavy-tailed neural-network priors", clopen.solutions.