# Group Ensemble: Learning an Ensemble of ConvNets in a single ConvNet

Source: [Group Ensemble: Learning an Ensemble of ConvNets in a single ConvNet](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa67d01e209131cea189e1>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-25T22:23:05.784Z

Authors: Hao Chen, Abhinav Shrivastava

Published: 2020-07-01T17:56:06.000Z

## Abstract

Ensemble learning is a general technique to improve accuracy in machine learning. However, the heavy computation of a ConvNets ensemble limits its usage in deep learning. In this paper, we present Group Ensemble Network (GENet), an architecture incorporating an ensemble of ConvNets in a single ConvNet. Through a shared-base and multi-head structure, GENet is divided into several groups to make explicit ensemble learning possible in a single ConvNet. Owing to group convolution and the shared-base, GENet can fully leverage the advantage of explicit ensemble learning while retaining the same computation as a single ConvNet. Additionally, we present Group Averaging, Group Wagging and Group Boosting as three different strategies to aggregate these ensemble members. Finally, GENet outperforms larger single networks, standard ensembles of smaller networks, and other recent state-of-the-art methods on CIFAR and ImageNet. Specifically, group ensemble reduces the top-1 error by 1.83% for ResNeXt-50 on ImageNet. We also demonstrate its effectiveness on action recognition and object detection tasks.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.00649>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.00649.pdf>)
