Variance Networks: When Expectation Does Not Meet Your Expectations

In this paper, we propose variance networks, a new model that stores the learned information in the variances of the network weights. Surprisingly, no information gets stored in the expectations of the weights, therefore if we replace these weights with their expectations, we would obtain a random guess quality prediction. We provide a numerical criterion that uses the loss curvature to determine which random variables can be replaced with their expected values, and find that only a small fraction of weights is needed for ensembling. Variance networks represent a diverse ensemble that is more robust to adversarial attacks than conventional low-variance ensembles. The success of this model raises several counter-intuitive implications for the training and application of Deep Learning models.