Neural Metamorphosis

TL;DR

Neural Metamorphosis (NeuMeta) introduces a method to learn a continuous weight manifold for neural networks, enabling the generation of effective weights for various architectures without retraining, demonstrated across multiple tasks.

Contribution

NeuMeta is the first approach to directly learn a continuous weight manifold for self-morphable neural networks using neural implicit functions as hypernetworks.

Findings

NeuMeta can synthesize weights for unseen network configurations.

It maintains high performance at up to 75% compression.

NeuMeta performs well across classification, segmentation, and generation tasks.

Abstract

This paper introduces a new learning paradigm termed Neural Metamorphosis (NeuMeta), which aims to build self-morphable neural networks. Contrary to crafting separate models for different architectures or sizes, NeuMeta directly learns the continuous weight manifold of neural networks. Once trained, we can sample weights for any-sized network directly from the manifold, even for previously unseen configurations, without retraining. To achieve this ambitious goal, NeuMeta trains neural implicit functions as hypernetworks. They accept coordinates within the model space as input, and generate corresponding weight values on the manifold. In other words, the implicit function is learned in a way, that the predicted weights is well-performed across various models sizes. In training those models, we notice that, the final performance closely relates on smoothness of the learned manifold. In pursuit of enhancing this smoothness, we employ two strategies. First, we permute weight matrices to achieve intra-model smoothness, by solving the Shortest Hamiltonian Path problem. Besides, we add a noise on the input coordinates when training the implicit function, ensuring models with various sizes shows consistent outputs. As such, NeuMeta shows promising results in synthesizing parameters for various network configurations. Our extensive tests in image classification, semantic segmentation, and image generation reveal that NeuMeta sustains full-size performance even at a 75% compression rate.