Conclusion
One of the greatest open questions in deep learning is why SGD manages to find good solutions, given that the training objectives are highly multimodal, and there are in principle many settings of parameters that achieve no training loss but poor generalization. By understanding geometric features such as flatness, which relate to generalization, we can begin to resolve these questions and build optimizers that provide even better generalization, and many other useful features, such as uncertainty representation. We have presented SWA, a simple drop-in replacement for standard SGD, which can in principle benefit anyone training a deep neural network. SWA has been demonstrated to have strong performance in a number of areas, including computer vision, semi-supervised learning, reinforcement learning, uncertainty representation, calibration, Bayesian model averaging, and low precision training.