We consider deep neural networks in a Bayesian framework with a prior distribution sampling the network weights at random. Following a recent idea of Agapiou and Castillo (2024), who show that heavy-tailed prior distributions achieve automatic adaptation to smoothness, we introduce a simple Bayesian deep learning prior based on heavy-tailed weights and ReLU activation. We show that the corresponding posterior distribution achieves near-optimal minimax contraction rates, simultaneously adaptive to both intrinsic dimension and smoothness of the underlying function, in a variety of contexts including nonparametric regression, geometric data and Besov spaces. While most works so far need a form of model selection built-in within the prior distribution, a key aspect of our approach is that it does not require to sample hyperparameters to learn the architecture of the network. We also provide variational Bayes counterparts of the results, that show that mean-field variational approximations still benefit from near-optimal theoretical support.

We establish a general Bernstein–von Mises theorem for approximately linear semiparametric functionals of fractional posterior distributions based on nonparametric priors. This is illustrated in a number of nonparametric settings and for different classes of prior distributions, including Gaussian process priors. We show that fractional posterior credible sets can provide reliable semiparametric uncertainty quantification, but have inflated size. To remedy this, we further propose a shifted-and-rescaled fractional posterior set that is an efficient confidence set having optimal size under regularity conditions. As part of our proofs, we also refine existing contraction rate results for fractional posteriors by sharpening the dependence of the rate on the fractional exponent.

Given a nonparametric Hidden Markov Model (HMM) with two states, the question of constructing efficient multiple testing procedures is considered, treating the states as unknown null and alternative hypotheses. A procedure is introduced, based on nonparametric empirical Bayes ideas, that controls the False Discovery Rate (FDR) at a user-specified level. Guarantees on power are also provided, in the form of a control of the true positive rate. One of the key steps in the construction requires supremum-norm convergence of preliminary estimators of the emission densities of the HMM. We provide the existence of such estimators, with convergence at the optimal minimax rate, for the case of a HMM with $J\ge 2$ states, which is of independent interest.