ModHiFi: Identifying High Fidelity predictive components for Model Modification

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Hauptverfasser: Kashyap, Dhruva, Murti, Chaitanya, Nayak, Pranav K, Narshana, Tanay, Bhattacharyya, Chiranjib
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Kashyap, Dhruva
Murti, Chaitanya
Nayak, Pranav K
Narshana, Tanay
Bhattacharyya, Chiranjib
author_facet Kashyap, Dhruva
Murti, Chaitanya
Nayak, Pranav K
Narshana, Tanay
Bhattacharyya, Chiranjib
contents Open weight models, which are ubiquitous, rarely provide access to their training data or loss function. This makes modifying such models for tasks such as pruning or unlearning, which are constrained by this unavailability, an active area of research. Existing techniques typically require gradients or ground-truth labels, rendering them infeasible in settings with limited computational resources. In this work, we investigate the fundamental question of identifying components that are critical to the model's predictive performance, without access to either gradients or the loss function, and with only distributional access such as synthetic data. We theoretically demonstrate that the global error is linearly bounded by local reconstruction errors for Lipschitz-continuous networks such as CNNs and well-trained Transformers (which, contrary to existing literature, we find exhibit Lipschitz continuity). This motivates using the locally reconstructive behavior of component subsets to quantify their global importance, via a metric that we term Subset Fidelity. In the uncorrelated features setting, selecting individual components based on their Subset Fidelity scores is optimal, which we utilize to propose ModHiFi, an algorithm for model modification that requires neither training data nor access to a loss function. ModHiFi-P, for structured pruning, achieves an 11\% speedup over the current state of the art on ImageNet models and competitive performance on language models. ModHiFi-U, for classwise unlearning, achieves complete unlearning on CIFAR-10 without fine-tuning and demonstrates competitive performance on Swin Transformers.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_19566
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ModHiFi: Identifying High Fidelity predictive components for Model Modification
Kashyap, Dhruva
Murti, Chaitanya
Nayak, Pranav K
Narshana, Tanay
Bhattacharyya, Chiranjib
Machine Learning
Open weight models, which are ubiquitous, rarely provide access to their training data or loss function. This makes modifying such models for tasks such as pruning or unlearning, which are constrained by this unavailability, an active area of research. Existing techniques typically require gradients or ground-truth labels, rendering them infeasible in settings with limited computational resources. In this work, we investigate the fundamental question of identifying components that are critical to the model's predictive performance, without access to either gradients or the loss function, and with only distributional access such as synthetic data. We theoretically demonstrate that the global error is linearly bounded by local reconstruction errors for Lipschitz-continuous networks such as CNNs and well-trained Transformers (which, contrary to existing literature, we find exhibit Lipschitz continuity). This motivates using the locally reconstructive behavior of component subsets to quantify their global importance, via a metric that we term Subset Fidelity. In the uncorrelated features setting, selecting individual components based on their Subset Fidelity scores is optimal, which we utilize to propose ModHiFi, an algorithm for model modification that requires neither training data nor access to a loss function. ModHiFi-P, for structured pruning, achieves an 11\% speedup over the current state of the art on ImageNet models and competitive performance on language models. ModHiFi-U, for classwise unlearning, achieves complete unlearning on CIFAR-10 without fine-tuning and demonstrates competitive performance on Swin Transformers.
title ModHiFi: Identifying High Fidelity predictive components for Model Modification
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19566