2021/06/15 by Fergus Simpson, Ian Davies, Simpson, Fergus +9 · 2 citations
Computer Science · #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Gaussian Processes and Bayesian Inference #Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Machine Learning (stat.ML) #Machine Learning and Data Classification
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2106.08185
openalex publication_date 2021/06/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Kernel selection plays a central role in determining the performance of Gaussian Process (GP) models, as the chosen kernel determines both the inductive biases and prior support of functions under the GP prior. This work addresses the challenge of constructing custom kernel functions for high-dimensional GP regression models. Drawing inspiration from recent progress in deep learning, we introduce a novel approach named KITT: Kernel Identification Through Transformers. KITT exploits a transformer-based architecture to generate kernel recommendations in under 0.1 seconds, which is several orders of magnitude faster than conventional kernel search algorithms. We train our model using synthetic data generated from priors over a vocabulary of known kernels. By exploiting the nature of the self-attention mechanism, KITT is able to process datasets with inputs of arbitrary dimension. We demonstrate that kernels chosen by KITT yield strong performance over a diverse collection of regression benchmarks.