Ensembles provably learn equivariance through data augmentation

Oskar Nordenfors, Axel Flinth

Keywords: equivariance, invariance, ensemble models, data augmentation, SGD

TL;DR: We prove that ensemble models learn equivariance through data augmentation.

Abstract: Recently, it was proved that group equivariance emerges in ensembles of neural networks as the result of full augmentation in the limit of infinitely wide neural networks (neural tangent kernel limit). In this paper, we extend this result significantly. We provide a proof that this emergence does not depend on the neural tangent kernel limit at all. We also consider stochastic settings, and furthermore general architectures. For the latter, we provide a simple sufficient condition on the relation between the architecture and the action of the group for our results to hold. We validate our findings through simple numeric experiments.

Primary Area: unsupervised, self-supervised, semi-supervised, and supervised representation learning

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Submission Number: 4689