{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/variational-learning-is-effective-for-large","title":"Variational Learning is Effective for Large Deep Networks","arxiv_id":"2402.17641","date":"2024-02-27","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yuesong Shen","Nico Daheim","Bai Cong","Peter Nickl","Gian Maria Marconi","Clement Bazan","Rio Yokota","Iryna Gurevych","Daniel Cremers","Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan","Thomas Möllenhoff"],"abstract":"We give extensive empirical evidence against the common belief that variational learning is ineffective for large neural networks. We show that an optimizer called Improved Variational Online Newton (IVON) consistently matches or outperforms Adam for training large networks such as GPT-2 and ResNets from scratch. IVON's computational costs are nearly identical to Adam but its predictive uncertainty is better. We show several new use cases of IVON where we improve finetuning and model merging in Large Language Models, accurately predict generalization error, and faithfully estimate sensitivity to data. 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