Do the Frankenstein, or how to achieve better out-of-distribution
  performance with manifold mixing model soup
Hannes Fassold
The standard recipe applied in transfer learning is to finetune a pretrained
model on the task-specific dataset with different hyperparameter settings and
pick the model with the highest accuracy on the validation dataset.
Unfortunately, this leads to models which do not perform well under
distribution shifts, e.g. when the model is given graphical sketches of the
object as input instead of photos. In order to address this, we propose the
manifold mixing model soup, an algorithm which mixes together the latent space
manifolds of multiple finetuned models in an optimal way in order to generate a
fused model. We show that the fused model gives significantly better
out-of-distribution performance (+3.5 % compared to best individual model) when
finetuning a CLIP model for image classification. In addition, it provides also
better accuracy on the original dataset where the finetuning has been done.