Deep Linear Probe Generators for Weight Space Learning
We conduct a study of weight space analysis methods and observe that probing is a promising approach for such tasks. However, we find that a vanilla probing approach performs no better than probing a neural network with random data. To address this, we propose "Deep Linear Probe Generators" (ProbeGen), a simple and effective modification to probing-based methods of weight space analysis. ProbeGen introduces a shared generator module with a deep linear architecture, providing an inductive bias toward structured probes. ProbeGen significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art and is highly efficient, requiring 30 to 1,000 times fewer FLOPs than other leading approaches.