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Aleatoric uncertainty captures the inherent randomness of the data, such as measurement noise. In Bayesian regression, we often use a Gaussian observation model, where we control the level of aleatoric uncertainty with a noise variance parameter. By contrast, for Bayesian classification we use a categorical distribution with no mechanism to represent our beliefs about aleatoric uncertainty. Our work shows that explicitly accounting for aleatoric uncertainty significantly improves the performance of Bayesian neural networks. We note that many standard benchmarks, such as CIFAR-10, have essentially no aleatoric uncertainty. Moreover, we show that data augmentation in approximate inference softens the likelihood, leading to underconfidence and misrepresenting our beliefs about aleatoric uncertainty. Accordingly, we find that a cold posterior, tempered by a power greater than one, often more honestly reflects our beliefs about aleatoric uncertainty than no tempering --- providing an explicit link between data augmentation and cold posteriors. We further show that we can match or exceed the performance of posterior tempering by using a Dirichlet observation model, where we explicitly control the level of aleatoric uncertainty, without any need for tempering. 

While there has been progress in developing non-vacuous generalization bounds for deep neural networks, these bounds tend to be uninformative about why deep learning works. In this paper, we develop a compression approach based on quantizing neural network parameters in a linear subspace, profoundly improving on previous results to provide state-of-the-art generalization bounds on a variety of tasks, including transfer learning. We use these tight bounds to better understand the role of model size, equivariance, and the implicit biases of optimization, for generalization in deep learning. Notably, we find large models can be compressed to a much greater extent than previously known, encapsulating Occam’s razor.