Why does it work?
There are large flat regions of the loss surface [9]. In Figure 3 below, we show a visualization of the loss surface in a subspace of the parameter space containing a path connecting two independently trained SGD solutions, such that the loss is similarly low at every point along the path. SGD converges near the boundary of these regions because there isn’t much gradient signal to move inside, as the points in the region all have similarly low values of loss. By increasing the learning rate, SWA spins around this flat region, and then by averaging the iterates, moves towards the center of the flat region.


