NeurIPS 2021

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Poster

Neural Ensemble Search for Uncertainty Estimation and Dataset Shift

Sheheryar Zaidi · Arber Zela · Thomas Elsken · Chris C Holmes · Frank Hutter · Yee Teh

Tue Dec 07 08:30 AM -- 10:00 AM (PST) @

in Poster Session 1 »

Ensembles of neural networks achieve superior performance compared to standalone networks in terms of accuracy, uncertainty calibration and robustness to dataset shift. Deep ensembles, a state-of-the-art method for uncertainty estimation, only ensemble random initializations of a fixed architecture. Instead, we propose two methods for automatically constructing ensembles with varying architectures, which implicitly trade-off individual architectures’ strengths against the ensemble’s diversity and exploit architectural variation as a source of diversity. On a variety of classification tasks and modern architecture search spaces, we show that the resulting ensembles outperform deep ensembles not only in terms of accuracy but also uncertainty calibration and robustness to dataset shift. Our further analysis and ablation studies provide evidence of higher ensemble diversity due to architectural variation, resulting in ensembles that can outperform deep ensembles, even when having weaker average base learners. To foster reproducibility, our code is available: https://github.com/automl/nes

Keywords: Deep Learning · Machine Learning · Robustness

[ OpenReview]

Author Information

Sheheryar Zaidi (University of Oxford)

Arber Zela (University of Freiburg)

Thomas Elsken (Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence)

Chris C Holmes (University of Oxford)

Frank Hutter (University of Freiburg & Bosch)

Frank Hutter is a Full Professor for Machine Learning at the Computer Science Department of the University of Freiburg (Germany), where he previously was an assistant professor 2013-2017. Before that, he was at the University of British Columbia (UBC) for eight years, for his PhD and postdoc. Frank's main research interests lie in machine learning, artificial intelligence and automated algorithm design. For his 2009 PhD thesis on algorithm configuration, he received the CAIAC doctoral dissertation award for the best thesis in AI in Canada that year, and with his coauthors, he received several best paper awards and prizes in international competitions on machine learning, SAT solving, and AI planning. Since 2016 he holds an ERC Starting Grant for a project on automating deep learning based on Bayesian optimization, Bayesian neural networks, and deep reinforcement learning.