Deep Ensembling with No Overhead for either Training or Testing: The All-Round Blessings of Dynamic Sparsity
The success of deep ensembles on improving predictive performance, uncertainty estimation, and out-of-distribution robustness has been extensively studied in the machine learning literature. Albeit the promising results, naively training multiple deep neural networks and combining their predictions at inference leads to prohibitive computational costs and memory requirements. Recently proposed efficient ensemble approaches reach the performance of the traditional deep ensembles with significantly lower costs. However, the training resources required by these approaches are still at least the same as training a single dense model. In this work, we draw a unique connection between sparse neural network training and deep ensembles, yielding a novel efficient ensemble learning framework called FreeTickets. Instead of training multiple dense networks and averaging them, we directly train sparse subnetworks from scratch and extract diverse yet accurate subnetworks during this efficient, sparse-to-sparse training. Our framework, FreeTickets, is defined as the ensemble of these relatively cheap sparse subnetworks. Despite being an ensemble method, FreeTickets has even fewer parameters and training FLOPs than a single dense model. This seemingly counter-intuitive outcome is due to the ultra training/inference efficiency of dynamic sparse training. FreeTickets surpasses the dense baseline in all the following criteria: prediction accuracy, uncertainty estimation, out-of-distribution (OoD) robustness, as well as efficiency for both training and inference. Impressively, FreeTickets outperforms the naive deep ensemble with ResNet50 on ImageNet using around only 1/5 of the training FLOPs required by the latter. We have released our source code at https://github.com/VITA-Group/FreeTickets.
Code (2)
Tasks
AllEnsemble LearningImage ClassificationMethods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Impact of Label Types on Training SWIN Models with Overhead Imagery
Understanding the impact of data set design on model training and performance can help alleviate the costs associated with generating remote sensing and overhead labeled data. This work examined the impact of training sh…
Objectobject-detectionObject DetectionSegmentation+1Self-distillation with Batch Knowledge Ensembling Improves ImageNet Classification
The recent studies of knowledge distillation have discovered that ensembling the "dark knowledge" from multiple teachers or students contributes to creating better soft targets for training, but at the cost of significan…
ClassificationGeneral ClassificationKnowledge DistillationLeveraging Prediction Entropy for Automatic Prompt Weighting in Zero-Shot Audio-Language Classification
Audio-language models have recently demonstrated strong zero-shot capabilities by leveraging natural-language supervision to classify audio events without labeled training data. Yet, their performance is highly sensitive…
Audio ClassificationZGUL: Zero-shot Generalization to Unseen Languages using Multi-source Ensembling of Language Adapters
We tackle the problem of zero-shot cross-lingual transfer in NLP tasks via the use of language adapters (LAs). Most of the earlier works have explored training with adapter of a single source (often English), and testing…
Cross-Lingual TransferLanguage ModellingNERPOS+3Toward Unsupervised Realistic Visual Question Answering
The problem of realistic VQA (RVQA), where a model has to reject unanswerable questions (UQs) and answer answerable ones (AQs), is studied. We first point out 2 drawbacks in current RVQA research, where (1) datasets cont…
Question AnsweringVisual Question AnsweringVisual Question Answering (VQA)