Papers › Neural networks with late-phase weights

Neural networks with late-phase weights

25 Jul 2020ICLR 2021 1arXiv:2007.12927archive 2025-07-28

Johannes von Oswald, Seijin Kobayashi, Alexander Meulemans, Christian Henning, Benjamin F. Grewe, João Sacramento

The largely successful method of training neural networks is to learn their weights using some variant of stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Here, we show that the solutions found by SGD can be further improved by ensembling a subset of the weights in late stages of learning. At the end of learning, we obtain back a single model by taking a spatial average in weight space. To avoid incurring increased computational costs, we investigate a family of low-dimensional late-phase weight models which interact multiplicatively with the remaining parameters. Our results show that augmenting standard models with late-phase weights improves generalization in established benchmarks such as CIFAR-10/100, ImageNet and enwik8. These findings are complemented with a theoretical analysis of a noisy quadratic problem which provides a simplified picture of the late phases of neural network learning.

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Tasks

Image Classification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Image Classification CIFAR-10 WRN 28-14 Percentage correct 97.45 #82 of 265 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification CIFAR-10 WRN 28-10 Percentage correct 96.81 #98 of 265 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification CIFAR-100 WRN 28-14 Percentage correct 85.00 #70 of 211 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification CIFAR-100 WRN 28-10 Percentage correct 83.06 #92 of 211 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

SGD

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