In plain words: It reuses weights saved during training, fitting a bell-curve spread around their average and sampling many weight sets to average predictions and gauge confidence. It beat tricks like randomly dropping neurons and rescaling confidence scores at spotting unfamiliar data and giving confidence that matches accuracy.
Abstract
We propose SWA-Gaussian (SWAG), a simple, scalable, and general purpose approach for uncertainty representation and calibration in deep learning. Stochastic Weight Averaging (SWA), which computes the first moment of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) iterates with a modified learning rate schedule, has recently been shown to improve generalization in deep learning. With SWAG, we fit a Gaussian using the SWA solution as the first moment and a low rank plus diagonal covariance also derived from the SGD iterates, forming an approximate posterior distribution over neural network weights; we then sample from this Gaussian distribution to perform Bayesian model averaging. We empirically find that SWAG approximates the shape of the true posterior, in accordance with results describing the stationary distribution of SGD iterates. Moreover, we demonstrate that SWAG performs well on a wide variety of tasks, including out of sample detection, calibration, and transfer learning, in comparison to many popular alternatives including MC dropout, KFAC Laplace, SGLD, and temperature scaling.
Wesley Maddox, Timur Garipov, Pavel Izmailov, Dmitry Vetrov, Andrew Gordon Wilson
arXiv:1902.02476 · cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV, stat.ML · submitted Feb 7, 2019 · updated Dec 31, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · Published at NeurIPS 2019