3 ms·
Nice writeup. Something that clicked for me reading this is how much the prior/likelihood/posterior dynamic mirrors transfer learning in deep learning. The prio
by oliver236 7mo ago
Nice writeup. Something that clicked for me reading this is how much the prior/likelihood/posterior dynamic mirrors transfer learning in deep learning. The prior is basically your pre-trained weights: broad knowledge you bring to the table before seeing any task-specific data. The likelihood is your fine-tuning step. And the Bernstein-von Mises result at the end is essentially saying "with enough fine-tuning data, your pre-training washes out."
Obviously the analogy isn't perfect (priors are explicit and interpretable, pre-trained weights are not), but I think it's a useful mental model for anyone coming from an ML background who finds Bayesian stats unintuitive. Regularization being secretly Bayesian was the other thing that made it click for me. If you've ever tuned a Ridge regression lambda, you were doing informal prior selection.