Distance-informed Neural Processes

Aishwarya Venkataramanan (Friedrich-Schiller Universität Jena) · Joachim Denzler (Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena)

bi-lipschitz regularizationclassification tasksdistance-aware local structuresdistance-informed neural processdistance-preserving latent spaceempirical resultsglobal latent variableinput similaritylocal data dependencieslocal latent variableout-of-distribution data predictive performance regression tasks uncertainty calibration uncertainty estimation

We propose the Distance-informed Neural Process (DNP), a novel variant of Neural Processes that improves uncertainty estimation by combining global and distance-aware local latent structures. Standard Neural Processes (NPs) often rely on a global latent variable and struggle with uncertainty calibration and capturing local data dependencies. DNP addresses these limitations by introducing a global latent variable to model task-level variations and a local latent variable to capture input similarity within a distance-preserving latent space. This is achieved through bi-Lipschitz regularization, which bounds distortions in input relationships and encourages the preservation of relative distances in the latent space. This modeling approach allows DNP to produce better-calibrated uncertainty estimates and more effectively distinguish in- from out-of-distribution data. Empirical results demonstrate that DNP achieves strong predictive performance and improved uncertainty calibration across regression and classification tasks.