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Autori principali: Subramaniam, Vighnesh, Conwell, Colin, Katz, Boris, Barbu, Andrei, Cheung, Brian
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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Accesso online:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.04198
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author Subramaniam, Vighnesh
Conwell, Colin
Katz, Boris
Barbu, Andrei
Cheung, Brian
author_facet Subramaniam, Vighnesh
Conwell, Colin
Katz, Boris
Barbu, Andrei
Cheung, Brian
contents A standard assumption in deep learning is that the inductive bias introduced by a neural network architecture must persist from training through inference. The architecture you train with is the architecture you deploy. This assumption constrains the community from selecting architectures that may have desirable efficiency or design properties due to difficulties with optimization. We challenge this assumption with Network of Theseus (NoT), a method for progressively converting a trained, or even untrained, guide network architecture part-by-part into an entirely different target network architecture while preserving the performance of the guide network. At each stage, components in the guide network architecture are incrementally replaced with target architecture modules and aligned via representational similarity metrics. This procedure largely preserves the functionality of the guide network even under substantial architectural changes-for example, converting a convolutional network into a multilayer perceptron, or GPT-2 into a recurrent neural network. By decoupling optimization from deployment, NoT expands the space of viable inference-time architectures, opening opportunities for better accuracy-efficiency tradeoffs and enabling more directed exploration of the architectural design space.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_04198
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Network of Theseus (like the ship)
Subramaniam, Vighnesh
Conwell, Colin
Katz, Boris
Barbu, Andrei
Cheung, Brian
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
A standard assumption in deep learning is that the inductive bias introduced by a neural network architecture must persist from training through inference. The architecture you train with is the architecture you deploy. This assumption constrains the community from selecting architectures that may have desirable efficiency or design properties due to difficulties with optimization. We challenge this assumption with Network of Theseus (NoT), a method for progressively converting a trained, or even untrained, guide network architecture part-by-part into an entirely different target network architecture while preserving the performance of the guide network. At each stage, components in the guide network architecture are incrementally replaced with target architecture modules and aligned via representational similarity metrics. This procedure largely preserves the functionality of the guide network even under substantial architectural changes-for example, converting a convolutional network into a multilayer perceptron, or GPT-2 into a recurrent neural network. By decoupling optimization from deployment, NoT expands the space of viable inference-time architectures, opening opportunities for better accuracy-efficiency tradeoffs and enabling more directed exploration of the architectural design space.
title Network of Theseus (like the ship)
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.04198