Title: Loss Surfaces, Mode Connectivity, and Fast Ensembling of DNNs,
Abstract: The loss functions of deep neural networks are complex and their geometric
properties are not well understood. We show that the optima of these complex
loss functions are in fact connected by simple curves over which training and
test accuracy are nearly constant. We introduce a training procedure to
discover these high-accuracy pathways between modes. Inspired by this new
geometric insight, we also propose a new ensembling method entitled Fast
Geometric Ensembling (FGE). Using FGE we can train high-performing ensembles in
the time required to train a single model. We achieve improved performance
compared to the recent state-of-the-art Snapshot Ensembles, on CIFAR-10,
CIFAR-100, and ImageNet.