2020

Predicting Neural Network Accuracy from Weights

Unterthiner, Thomas, Keysers, Daniel, Gelly, Sylvain et al.

Understand

We show experimentally that the accuracy of a trained neural network can be predicted surprisingly well by looking only at its weights, without evaluating it on input data.

  • We motivate this task and introduce a formal setting for it.
  • Even when using simple statistics of the weights, the predictors are able to rank neural networks by their performance with very high accuracy (R2 score more than 0.98).
  • Furthermore, the predictors are able to rank networks trained on different, unobserved datasets and with different architectures.

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