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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Adam, Maxwell, Furman, Zach, Hoogland, Jesse
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26537
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Table of Contents:
  • We introduce the loss kernel, an interpretability method for measuring similarity between data points according to a trained neural network. The kernel is the covariance matrix of per-sample losses computed under a distribution of low-loss-preserving parameter perturbations. We first validate our method on a synthetic multitask problem, showing it separates inputs by task as predicted by theory. We then apply this kernel to Inception-v1 to visualize the structure of ImageNet, and we show that the kernel's structure aligns with the WordNet semantic hierarchy. This establishes the loss kernel as a practical tool for interpretability and data attribution.