SuperWeight Ensembles: Automated Compositional Parameter Sharing Across Diverse Architechtures

Piotr Teterwak, Soren Nelson, Nikoli Dryden, Dina Bashkirova, Kate Saenko, Bryan A. Plummer

Keywords: efficent ensembles, anytime inference

TL;DR: A novel efficient ensembling technique for ensembling models of different architechtures; enabling anytime inference

Abstract: Neural net ensembles boost task performance, but have excessive storage requirements. Recent work in efficient ensembling has made the memory cost more tractable by sharing learned parameters between ensemble members. Existing efficient ensembles have high predictive accuracy, but they are overly restrictive in two ways: 1) They constrain ensemble members to have the same architecture, limiting their usefulness in applications such as anytime inference, and 2) They reduce the parameter count for a small predictive performance penalty, but do not provide an easy way to trade-off parameter count for predictive performance without increasing inference time. In this paper, we propose SuperWeight Ensembles, an approach for architecture-agnostic parameter sharing. SuperWeight Ensembles share parameters between layers which have sufficiently similar computation, even if they have different shapes. This allows anytime prediction of heterogeneous ensembles by selecting a subset of members during inference, which is a flexibility not supported by prior work. In addition, SuperWeight Ensembles provide control over the total number of parameters used, allowing us to increase or decrease the number of parameters without changing model architecture. On the anytime prediction task, our method shows a consistent boost over prior work while allowing for more flexibility in architectures and efficient parameter sharing. SuperWeight Ensembles preserve the performance of prior work in the low-parameter regime, and even outperform fully-parameterized ensembles with 17% fewer parameters on CIFAR-100 and 50% fewer parameters on ImageNet.

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