Discovering Hidden Gems in Model Repositories

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Kahana, Jonathan, Horwitz, Eliahu, Hoshen, Yedid
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Kahana, Jonathan
Horwitz, Eliahu
Hoshen, Yedid
author_facet Kahana, Jonathan
Horwitz, Eliahu
Hoshen, Yedid
contents Public repositories host millions of fine-tuned models, yet community usage remains disproportionately concentrated on a small number of foundation checkpoints. We investigate whether this concentration reflects efficient market selection or if superior models are systematically overlooked. Through an extensive evaluation of over 2,000 models, we show the prevalence of "hidden gems", unpopular fine-tunes that significantly outperform their popular counterparts. Notably, within the Llama-3.1-8B family, we find rarely downloaded checkpoints that improve math performance from 83.2% to 96.0% without increasing inference costs. However, discovering these models through exhaustive evaluation of every uploaded model is computationally infeasible. We therefore formulate model discovery as a Multi-Armed Bandit problem and accelerate the Sequential Halving search algorithm by using shared query sets and aggressive elimination schedules. Our method retrieves top models with as few as 50 queries per candidate, accelerating discovery by over 50x.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_22157
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Discovering Hidden Gems in Model Repositories
Kahana, Jonathan
Horwitz, Eliahu
Hoshen, Yedid
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Public repositories host millions of fine-tuned models, yet community usage remains disproportionately concentrated on a small number of foundation checkpoints. We investigate whether this concentration reflects efficient market selection or if superior models are systematically overlooked. Through an extensive evaluation of over 2,000 models, we show the prevalence of "hidden gems", unpopular fine-tunes that significantly outperform their popular counterparts. Notably, within the Llama-3.1-8B family, we find rarely downloaded checkpoints that improve math performance from 83.2% to 96.0% without increasing inference costs. However, discovering these models through exhaustive evaluation of every uploaded model is computationally infeasible. We therefore formulate model discovery as a Multi-Armed Bandit problem and accelerate the Sequential Halving search algorithm by using shared query sets and aggressive elimination schedules. Our method retrieves top models with as few as 50 queries per candidate, accelerating discovery by over 50x.
title Discovering Hidden Gems in Model Repositories
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.22157