NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper
Asymmetric Duos: Sidekicks Improve Uncertainty
- Tim G. Zhou
- Evan Shelhamer
- Geoff Pleiss
The go-to strategy to apply deep networks in settings where uncertainty informs decisions—ensembling multiple training runs with random initializations—is ill-suited for the extremely large-scale models and practical fine-tuning workflows of today. We introduce a new cost-effective strategy for improving the uncertainty quantification and downstream decisions of a large model (e. g. a fine-tuned ViT-B): coupling it with a less accurate but much smaller "sidekick" (e. g. a fine-tuned ResNet-34) with a fraction of the computational cost. We propose aggregating the predictions of this *Asymmetric Duo* by simple learned weighted averaging. Surprisingly, despite their inherent asymmetry, the sidekick model almost never harms the performance of the larger model. In fact, across five image classification benchmarks, and a variety of model architectures and training schemes (including soups), Asymmetric Duos significantly improve accuracy, uncertainty quantification, and selective classification metrics with only ${\sim}10-20$% more computation. Code is available at: https: //github. com/timgzhou/asymmetric-duos