Symmetries in Weight Space Learning: To Retain or Remove?

MCML Authors

Stefanie Jegelka

Prof. Dr.

Principal Investigator

Foundations of Deep Neural Networks

Abstract

Weight space learning, an emerging paradigm that seeks to understand neural networks through their space of parameters (weights), has shown promise in a variety of applications, including but not limited to predicting model behavior and addressing privacy concerns. However, weight spaces often exhibit inherent symmetries that impact both theory and practice, such as the scale and rotational invariances found in the Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) method, which is the state-of-the-art fine-tuning algorithm for Large Language Models (LLMs). In this work, we investigate a general weight space learning problem under symmetries, focusing on a fundamental question: What is the appropriate formulation for this problem in the presence of symmetries (such as those in LoRA), and should redundant representations that encode the same end-to-end function be removed? We address this question by fully characterizing a new space of symmetric weights, demonstrating that the relevance of redundancy depends on the function being predicted. Specifically, we show that end-to-end symmetries (such as those in LoRA) should not always be removed, as doing so may compromise the universality of the weight space learning problem. To our knowledge, this is the first time this phenomenon has been formally identified and presented, yielding insights into a broad class of weight space learning problems.

inproceedings

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HiLD @ICML 2025

Workshop on High-dimensional Learning Dynamics at the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning. Vancouver, Canada, Jul 13-19, 2025.

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Authors

F. Kiwitt • B. Tahmasebi • S. Jegelka

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Links

URL

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Research Area

 A3 | Computational Models