@conference {cSchurholt22, title = {Hyper-Representations as Generative Models: Sampling Unseen Neural Network Weights}, booktitle = {NeurIPS 2022 - Neural Information Processing Systems}, year = {2022}, abstract = {

Learning representations of neural network weights given a model zoo is an emerging and challenging area with many potential applications from model inspection, to neural architecture search or knowledge distillation. Recently, an autoencoder trained on a model zoo was able to learn a hyper-representation, which captures intrinsic and extrinsic properties of the models in the zoo. In this work, we extend hyper-representations for generative use to sample new model weights as pre-training. We propose layer-wise loss normalization which we demonstrate is key to generate high-performing models and a sampling method based on the empirical density of hyper-representations. The models generated using our methods are diverse, performant and capable to outperform conventional baselines for transfer learning. Our results indicate the potential of knowledge aggregation from model zoos to new models via hyper-representations thereby paving the avenue for novel research directions.

}, author = {Sch{\"u}rholt, Konstantin and Knyazev, Boris and Xavier Gir{\'o}-i-Nieto and Borth, Damian} } @conference {cSchurholt22a, title = {Model Zoos: A Dataset of Diverse Populations of Neural Network Models}, booktitle = {NeurIPS}, year = {2022}, month = {09/2022}, abstract = {

In the last years, neural networks (NN) have evolved from laboratory environments to the state-of-the-art for many real-world problems. It was shown that NN models (i.e., their weights and biases) evolve on unique trajectories in weight space during training. Following, a population of such neural network models (referred to as model zoo) would form structures in weight space. We think that the geometry, curvature and smoothness of these structures contain information about the state of training and can reveal latent properties of individual models. With such model zoos, one could investigate novel approaches for (i) model analysis, (ii) discover unknown learning dynamics, (iii) learn rich representations of such populations, or (iv) exploit the model zoos for generative modelling of NN weights and biases. Unfortunately, the lack of standardized model zoos and available benchmarks significantly increases the friction for further research about populations of NNs. With this work, we publish a novel dataset of model zoos containing systematically generated and diverse populations of NN models for further research. In total the proposed model zoo dataset is based on eight image datasets, consists of 27 model zoos trained with varying hyperparameter combinations and includes 50{\textquoteright}360 unique NN models as well as their sparsified twins, resulting in over 3,844,360 collected model states. Additionally, to the model zoo data we provide an in-depth analysis of the zoos and provide benchmarks for multiple downstream tasks.

}, author = {Sch{\"u}rholt, Konstantin and Taskiran, Diyar and Knyazev, Boris and Xavier Gir{\'o}-i-Nieto and Borth, Damian} } @conference {cSchurholt22b, title = {Model Zoos: A Dataset of Diverse Populations of Neural Network Models}, booktitle = {NeurIPS 2022 Track Datasets and Benchmarks}, year = {2022}, month = {12/2022}, address = {New Orleans, Louisiana, USA.}, abstract = {

In the last years, neural networks (NN) have evolved from laboratory environments to the state-of-the-art for many real-world problems. It was shown that NN models (i.e., their weights and biases) evolve on unique trajectories in weight space during training. Following, a population of such neural network models (referred to as model zoo) would form structures in weight space. We think that the geometry, curvature and smoothness of these structures contain information about the state of training and can reveal latent properties of individual models. With such model zoos, one could investigate novel approaches for (i) model analysis, (ii) discover unknown learning dynamics, (iii) learn rich representations of such populations, or (iv) exploit the model zoos for generative modelling of NN weights and biases. Unfortunately, the lack of standardized model zoos and available benchmarks significantly increases the friction for further research about populations of NNs. With this work, we publish a novel dataset of model zoos containing systematically generated and diverse populations of NN models for further research. In total the proposed model zoo dataset is based on eight image datasets, consists of 27 model zoos trained with varying hyperparameter combinations and includes 50{\textquoteright}360 unique NN models as well as their sparsified twins, resulting in over 3{\textquoteright}844{\textquoteright}360 collected model states. Additionally, to the model zoo data we provide an in-depth analysis of the zoos and provide benchmarks for multiple downstream tasks.The dataset can be found at www.modelzoos.cc.

}, author = {Sch{\"u}rholt, Konstantin and Taskiran, Diyar and Knyazev, Boris and Xavier Gir{\'o}-i-Nieto and Borth, Damian} } @mastersthesis {xCaselles21, title = {Disentangling neural network structure from the weights space}, year = {2021}, abstract = {

Deep Neural Networks have been used to tackle a wide variety of tasks achieving great performance. However, there is still a lack of knowledge of how the training of these models converge and how weights relate to their properties. In this thesis we investigate the structure of the weight space and try to disentangle its properties. Attention mechanisms are introduced to capture relations among neurons{\textquoteright} weights that help in weight reconstruction, hyper-parameter classification and accuracy prediction. Our approach further has the potential to work with variable input size allowing different network width, depth or even architecture types.

}, author = {Caselles, Pol}, editor = {Sch{\"u}rholt, Konstantin and Borth, Damian and Xavier Gir{\'o}-i-Nieto} }