Parameter Prediction for Unseen Deep Architectures

Boris Knyazev, Michal Drozdzal, Graham W. Taylor, Adriana Romero

Keywords: parameter prediction, hypernetworks, graph networks, computational graphs, optimization, meta-learning, deep networks

TL;DR: We propose a benchmark and models for predicting parameters of diverse neural networks in a single forward pass using another network

Abstract: Deep learning has been successful in automating the design of features in machine learning pipelines. However, the algorithms optimizing neural network parameters remain largely hand-designed and computationally inefficient. We study if we can use deep learning to directly predict these parameters by exploiting the past knowledge of training other networks. We introduce a large-scale dataset of diverse computational graphs of neural architectures - DeepNets-1M - and use it to explore parameter prediction on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet. By leveraging advances in graph neural networks, we propose a hypernetwork that can predict performant parameters in a single forward pass taking a fraction of a second, even on a CPU. The proposed model achieves surprisingly good performance on unseen and diverse networks. For example, it is able to predict all 24 million parameters of a ResNet-50 achieving a 60% accuracy on CIFAR-10. On ImageNet, top-5 accuracy of some of our networks approaches 50%. Our task along with the model and results can potentially lead to a new, more computationally efficient paradigm of training networks. Our model also learns a strong representation of neural architectures enabling their analysis.

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Code: https://github.com/facebookresearch/ppuda

Community Implementations: [ 5 code implementations](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2110.13100/code)