EnsembleNet: End-to-End Optimization of Multi-headed Models

Ensembling is a universally useful approach to boost the performance of machine learning models. However, individual models in an ensemble are typically trained independently in separate stages, without information access about the overall ensemble. In this paper, model ensembles are treated as first-class citizens, and their performance is optimized end-to-end with parameter sharing and a novel loss structure that improves generalization. On large-scale datasets including ImageNet, Youtube-8M, and Kinetics, we demonstrate a procedure that starts from a strongly performing single deep neural network, and constructs an EnsembleNet that has both a smaller size and better performance. Moreover, an EnsembleNet can be trained in one stage just like a single model without manual intervention.