# Neural Feature Governance: Extending Atom Prevalence

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.21671 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21671/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [Categorical Reparameterization with Gumbel-Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01144/) (2016)
- [What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04977/) (2017)
- [The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Finding Sparse, Trainable Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03635/) (2018)
- [Learning both Weights and Connections for Efficient Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02626/) (2015)
- [The Concrete Distribution: A Continuous Relaxation of Discrete Random Variables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.00712/) (2016)
- [Weight Uncertainty in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05424/) (2015)
- [Variational Dropout Sparsifies Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.05369/) (2017)
- [Winning the Lottery Ahead of Time: Efficient Early Network Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10451/) (2022)
- [Layer Adaptive Node Selection in Bayesian Neural Networks: Statistical Guarantees and Implementation Details](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11000/) (2021)
- [Bayesian Lottery Ticket Hypothesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18825/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Neural network compression and interpretability remain open challenges in modern deep learn- ing, where billion-parameter architectures deliver impressive accuracy at the cost of trans- parency, computational efficiency, and reliable uncertainty quantification. This paper introduces Neural Atom Prevalence (NAP), a principled Bayesian framework for structured node-level model selection in feedforward neural networks. NAP introduces the neural atom (activation unit) and functions as a hybrid method operating through a four-phase pipeline: Bayesian Lottery Ticket (BLT) identification via Iterative Magnitude Pruning (IMP), soft variational training of the Spike and Slab Independent Gaussian (SS-IG) model, Poisson-Binomial (PB) optimal layer-size selection, and Bayesian fine-tuning to produce a sparse, stable, interpretable, and accurate model. Extensive empirical validation across simulated nonlinear regression, two UCI benchmark datasets (Concrete, YearPredictionMSD), and the MNIST image classification task demonstrates that NAP achieves state-of-the-art structural sparsity, reducing active nodes to as few as 8% of the original dense architecture on MNIST, while well-calibrated probabilisti- cally: the aleatoric-epistemic uncertainty decomposition reveals that model ignorance accounts for only 3 to 4% of total predictive variance across all experiments, and regression reliability diagrams confirm a near-nominal predictive interval coverage (93.4% observed against a 95% target). These results establish NAP as a reliable, theoretically grounded, and computation- ally tractable solution to the simultaneous pursuit of sparsity, accuracy, interpretability, and uncertainty quantification in Bayesian neural networks.