Learning Model Representations Using Publicly Available Model Hubs

Abstract: The weights of neural networks have emerged as a novel data modality, giving rise to the field of weight space learning. A central challenge in this area is that learning meaningful representations of weights typically requires large, carefully constructed collections of trained models, typically referred to as model zoos. These model zoos are often trained ad-hoc, requiring large computational resources, constraining the learned weight space representations in scale and flexibility. In this work, we drop this requirement by training a weight space learning backbone on arbitrary models downloaded from large, unstructured model repositories such as Hugging Face. Unlike curated model zoos, these repositories contain highly heterogeneous models: they vary in architecture and dataset, and are largely undocumented. To address the methodological challenges posed by such heterogeneity, we propose a new weight space backbone designed to handle unstructured model populations. We demonstrate that weight space representations trained on models from Hugging Face achieve strong performance, often outperforming backbones trained on laboratory-generated model zoos. Finally, we show that the diversity of the model weights in our training set allows our weight space model to generalize to unseen data modalities. By demonstrating that high-quality weight space representations can be learned in the wild, we show that curated model zoos are not indispensable, thereby overcoming a strong limitation currently faced by the weight space learning community.