Analysis of Linear Mode Connectivity via Permutation-Based Weight Matching: With Insights into Other Permutation Search Methods

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Ito, Akira, Yamada, Masanori, Kumagai, Atsutoshi
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Ito, Akira
Yamada, Masanori
Kumagai, Atsutoshi
author_facet Ito, Akira
Yamada, Masanori
Kumagai, Atsutoshi
contents Recently, Ainsworth et al. showed that using weight matching (WM) to minimize the $L^2$ distance in a permutation search of model parameters effectively identifies permutations that satisfy linear mode connectivity (LMC), where the loss along a linear path between two independently trained models with different seeds remains nearly constant. This paper analyzes LMC using WM, which is useful for understanding stochastic gradient descent's effectiveness and its application in areas like model merging. We first empirically show that permutations found by WM do not significantly reduce the $L^2$ distance between two models, and the occurrence of LMC is not merely due to distance reduction by WM itself. We then demonstrate that permutations can change the directions of the singular vectors, but not the singular values, of the weight matrices in each layer. This finding shows that permutations found by WM primarily align the directions of singular vectors associated with large singular values across models. This alignment brings the singular vectors with large singular values, which determine the model's functionality, closer between the original and merged models, allowing the merged model to retain functionality similar to the original models, thereby satisfying LMC. This paper also analyzes activation matching (AM) in terms of singular vectors and finds that the principle of AM is likely the same as that of WM. Finally, we analyze the difference between WM and the straight-through estimator (STE), a dataset-dependent permutation search method, and show that WM can be more advantageous than STE in achieving LMC among three or more models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_04051
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Analysis of Linear Mode Connectivity via Permutation-Based Weight Matching: With Insights into Other Permutation Search Methods
Ito, Akira
Yamada, Masanori
Kumagai, Atsutoshi
Machine Learning
Recently, Ainsworth et al. showed that using weight matching (WM) to minimize the $L^2$ distance in a permutation search of model parameters effectively identifies permutations that satisfy linear mode connectivity (LMC), where the loss along a linear path between two independently trained models with different seeds remains nearly constant. This paper analyzes LMC using WM, which is useful for understanding stochastic gradient descent's effectiveness and its application in areas like model merging. We first empirically show that permutations found by WM do not significantly reduce the $L^2$ distance between two models, and the occurrence of LMC is not merely due to distance reduction by WM itself. We then demonstrate that permutations can change the directions of the singular vectors, but not the singular values, of the weight matrices in each layer. This finding shows that permutations found by WM primarily align the directions of singular vectors associated with large singular values across models. This alignment brings the singular vectors with large singular values, which determine the model's functionality, closer between the original and merged models, allowing the merged model to retain functionality similar to the original models, thereby satisfying LMC. This paper also analyzes activation matching (AM) in terms of singular vectors and finds that the principle of AM is likely the same as that of WM. Finally, we analyze the difference between WM and the straight-through estimator (STE), a dataset-dependent permutation search method, and show that WM can be more advantageous than STE in achieving LMC among three or more models.
title Analysis of Linear Mode Connectivity via Permutation-Based Weight Matching: With Insights into Other Permutation Search Methods
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.04051