2024/05/28 by Donato Crisostomi, Crisostomi, Donato, Marco Fumero +7 · 3 citations
Computer Science · #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Model-Driven Software Engineering Techniques
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2405.17897
openalex publication_date 2024/05/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
In this paper, we present a novel data-free method for merging neural networks in weight space. Differently from most existing works, our method optimizes for the permutations of network neurons globally across all layers. This allows us to enforce cycle consistency of the permutations when merging N ≥ 3 models, allowing circular compositions of permutations to be computed without accumulating error along the path. We qualitatively and quantitatively motivate the need for such a constraint, showing its benefits when merging sets of models in scenarios spanning varying architectures and datasets. We finally show that, when coupled with activation renormalization, our approach yields the best results in the task.