In plain words: Inside one network, several subnetworks each get a different input and learn the task on their own, then their answers are combined in one pass. This beat methods that run the network many times, improving accuracy and uncertainty on image tasks with no extra computation.
Abstract
Recent approaches to efficiently ensemble neural networks have shown that strong robustness and uncertainty performance can be achieved with a negligible gain in parameters over the original network. However, these methods still require multiple forward passes for prediction, leading to a significant computational cost. In this work, we show a surprising result: the benefits of using multiple predictions can be achieved `for free' under a single model's forward pass. In particular, we show that, using a multi-input multi-output (MIMO) configuration, one can utilize a single model's capacity to train multiple subnetworks that independently learn the task at hand. By ensembling the predictions made by the subnetworks, we improve model robustness without increasing compute. We observe a significant improvement in negative log-likelihood, accuracy, and calibration error on CIFAR10, CIFAR100, ImageNet, and their out-of-distribution variants compared to previous methods.
Marton Havasi, Rodolphe Jenatton, Stanislav Fort, Jeremiah Zhe Liu, Jasper Snoek, Balaji Lakshminarayanan, Andrew M. Dai, Dustin Tran
arXiv:2010.06610 · cs.LG, cs.CV, stat.ML · submitted Oct 13, 2020 · updated Aug 4, 2021
abstract · pdf · html · Updated to the ICLR camera ready version, added reference to Soflaei et al. 2020