Mechanistic Mode Connectivity

Ekdeep Singh Lubana, Eric J Bigelow, Robert P. Dick, David Krueger, Hidenori Tanaka

Keywords: Loss landscapes, Mechanisms, Mode Connectivity

Abstract: With the rise of pretrained models, fine-tuning has become of central importance in deep learning. However, unlike retraining from scratch, fine-tuning can fail to qualitatively change the behavior of a pre-trained network. For instance, we find in practice that naive fine-tuning does not eliminate a model’s sensitivity to spurious features. To understand and address this limitation, we study the geometry of neural network loss landscapes through the lens of mode-connectivity. Our work addresses two questions about mode-connectivity: 1) Are models trained on different data distributions mode-connected? 2) Can we fine tune a pre-trained model to switch modes? We define a notion of mechanistic mode-connectivity, and find that only models that already share the same invariances (which we call “mechanistically similar”) are mechanistically mode-connected. We hypothesize this property explains inability of naive fine-tuning methods to induce invariance to spurious features. Based on our analysis, we propose and validate a method of “mechanistic fine-tuning” called connectivity-based fine-tuning (CBFT)

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