Emergent Equivariance in Deep Ensembles

Properties
authors	Jan E. Gerken, Pan Kessel
year	2024
url	https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.03103

Abstract

We demonstrate that deep ensembles are secretly equivariant models. More precisely, we show that deep ensembles become equivariant for all inputs and at all training times by simply using data augmentation. Crucially, equivariance holds off-manifold and for any architecture in the infinite width limit. The equivariance is emergent in the sense that predictions of individual ensemble members are not equivariant but their collective prediction is. Neural tangent kernel theory is used to derive this result and we verify our theoretical insights using detailed numerical experiments.