Predicting the Performance of Foundation Models via
  Agreement-on-the-Line
Aman Mehra Rahul Saxena Taeyoun Kim Christina Baek Zico Kolter Aditi Raghunathan
Estimating the out-of-distribution performance in regimes where labels are
scarce is critical to safely deploy foundation models. Recently, it was shown
that ensembles of neural networks observe the phenomena
``agreement-on-the-line'', which can be leveraged to reliably predict OOD
performance without labels. However, in contrast to classical neural networks
that are trained on in-distribution data from scratch for numerous epochs,
foundation models undergo minimal finetuning from heavily pretrained weights,
which may reduce the ensemble diversity needed to observe
agreement-on-the-line. In our work, we demonstrate that when lightly finetuning
multiple runs from a $\textit{single}$ foundation model, the choice of
randomness during training (linear head initialization, data ordering, and data
subsetting) can lead to drastically different levels of agreement-on-the-line
in the resulting ensemble. Surprisingly, only random head initialization is
able to reliably induce agreement-on-the-line in finetuned foundation models
across vision and language benchmarks. Second, we demonstrate that ensembles of
$\textit{multiple}$ foundation models pretrained on different datasets but
finetuned on the same task can also show agreement-on-the-line. In total, by
careful construction of a diverse ensemble, we can utilize
agreement-on-the-line-based methods to predict the OOD performance of
foundation models with high precision.