Machine learning models based on the aggregated outputs of submodels, either at the activation or prediction levels, lead to strong performance. We study the interplay of two popular classes of such models: ensembles of neural networks and sparse mixture of experts (sparse MoEs). First, we show that these two approaches have complementary features whose combination is beneficial. Then, we present partitioned batch ensembles, an efficient ensemble of sparse MoEs that takes the best of both classes of models. Extensive experiments on fine-tuned vision transformers demonstrate the accuracy, log-likelihood, few-shot learning, robustness, and uncertainty calibration improvements of our approach over several challenging baselines. Partitioned batch ensembles not only scale to models with up to 2.7B parameters, but also provide larger performance gains for larger models.

A recent trend in artificial intelligence is the use of pretrained models for language and vision tasks, which have achieved extraordinary performance but also puzzling failures. Probing these models’ abilities in diverse ways is therefore critical to the field. In this paper, we explore the reliability of models, where we define a reliable model as one that not only achieves strong predictive performance but also performs well consistently over many decision-making tasks involving uncertainty (e.g., selective prediction, open set recognition), robust generalization (e.g., accuracy and proper scoring rules such as log-likelihood on in- and out-of-distribution datasets), and adaptation (e.g., active learning, few-shot uncertainty). We devise 10 types of tasks over 40 datasets in order to evaluate different aspects of reliability on both vision and language domains. To improve reliability, we developed ViT-Plex and T5-Plex, pretrained large model extensions for vision and language modalities, respectively. Plex greatly improves the state-of-the-art across reliability tasks, and simplifies the traditional protocol as it improves the out-of-the-box performance and does not require designing scores or tuning the model for each task. We demonstrate scaling effects over model sizes up to 1B parameters and pretraining dataset sizes up to 4B examples. We also demonstrate Plex’s capabilities on challenging tasks including zero-shot open set recognition, active learning, and uncertainty in conversational language understanding.

Ensembles are a straightforward, remarkably effective method for improving the accuracy, calibration, and robustness of neural networks on classification tasks. Yet, the reasons underlying their success remain an active area of research. Building upon (Pfau, 2013), we turn to the bias-variance decomposition of Bregman divergences in order to gain insight into the behavior of ensembles under classification losses. Introducing a dual reparameterization of the bias-variance decomposition, we first derive generalized laws of total expectation and variance, then discuss how bias and variance terms can be estimated empirically. Next, we show that the dual reparameterization naturally introduces a way of constructing ensembles which reduces the variance and leaves the bias unchanged. Conversely, we show that ensembles that directly average model outputs can arbitrarily increase or decrease the bias. Empirically, we see that such ensembles of neural networks may reduce the bias. We conclude with an empirical analysis of ensembles over neural network architecture hyperparameters, revealing that these techniques allow for more efficient bias reduction than standard ensembles.