PEP: Parameter Ensembling by Perturbation

Ensembling is now recognized as an effective approach for increasing the predictive performance and calibration of deep networks. We introduce a new approach, Parameter Ensembling by Perturbation (PEP), that constructs an ensemble of parameter values as random perturbations of the optimal parameter set from training by a Gaussian with a single variance parameter. The variance is chosen to maximize the log-likelihood of the ensemble average () on the validation data set. Empirically, and perhaps surprisingly, has a well-defined maximum as the variance grows from zero (which corresponds to the baseline model). Conveniently, calibration level of predictions also tends to grow favorably until the peak of is reached.