Can this Model Also Recognize Dogs? Zero-Shot Model Search from Weights
Authors: name: Jonathan Kahana; name: Or Nathan; name: Eliahu Horwitz; name: Yedid Hoshen
Published: 2025-02-13 18:59:44

Abstract: With the increasing numbers of publicly available models, there are probably
pretrained, online models for most tasks users require. However, current model
search methods are rudimentary, essentially a text-based search in the
documentation, thus users cannot find the relevant models. This paper presents
ProbeLog, a method for retrieving classification models that can recognize a
target concept, such as "Dog", without access to model metadata or training
data. Differently from previous probing methods, ProbeLog computes a descriptor
for each output dimension (logit) of each model, by observing its responses on
a fixed set of inputs (probes). Our method supports both logit-based retrieval
("find more logits like this") and zero-shot, text-based retrieval ("find all
logits corresponding to dogs"). As probing-based representations require
multiple costly feedforward passes through the model, we develop a method,
based on collaborative filtering, that reduces the cost of encoding
repositories by 3x. We demonstrate that ProbeLog achieves high retrieval
accuracy, both in real-world and fine-grained search tasks and is scalable to
full-size repositories.