Deep Combinatorial AggregationDownload PDF

Published: 31 Oct 2022, Last Modified: 12 Mar 2024NeurIPS 2022 AcceptReaders: Everyone
Keywords: deep combinatorial aggregation, deep combinatorial weight averaging, consistency enforcing loss, uncertainty estimation
TL;DR: We propose a new method (DCA) for uncertainty-aware learning and a related weight averaging scheme (DCWA) that boosts the predictive performance.
Abstract: Neural networks are known to produce poor uncertainty estimations, and a variety of approaches have been proposed to remedy this issue. This includes deep ensemble, a simple and effective method that achieves state-of-the-art results for uncertainty-aware learning tasks. In this work, we explore a combinatorial generalization of deep ensemble called deep combinatorial aggregation (DCA). DCA creates multiple instances of network components and aggregates their combinations to produce diversified model proposals and predictions. DCA components can be defined at different levels of granularity. And we discovered that coarse-grain DCAs can outperform deep ensemble for uncertainty-aware learning both in terms of predictive performance and uncertainty estimation. For fine-grain DCAs, we discover that an average parameterization approach named deep combinatorial weight averaging (DCWA) can improve the baseline training. It is on par with stochastic weight averaging (SWA) but does not require any custom training schedule or adaptation of BatchNorm layers. Furthermore, we propose a consistency enforcing loss that helps the training of DCWA and modelwise DCA. We experiment on in-domain, distributional shift, and out-of-distribution image classification tasks, and empirically confirm the effectiveness of DCWA and DCA approaches.
Supplementary Material: zip
Community Implementations: [![CatalyzeX](/images/catalyzex_icon.svg) 2 code implementations](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2210.06436/code)
15 Replies

Loading