Model Spider: Learning to Rank Pre-Trained Models Efficiently
Main Conference Track
Authors: Yi-Kai Zhang, Ting-Ji Huang, Yao-Xiang Ding, De-Chuan Zhan, Han-Jia Ye

Figuring out which Pre-Trained Model (PTM) from a model zoo fits the target task is essential to take advantage of plentiful model resources. With the availability of numerous heterogeneous PTMs from diverse fields, efficiently selecting the most suitable one is challenging due to the time-consuming costs of carrying out forward or backward passes over all PTMs. In this paper, we propose Model Spider, which tokenizes both PTMs and tasks by summarizing their characteristics into vectors to enable efficient PTM selection. By leveraging the approximated performance of PTMs on a separate set of training tasks, Model Spider learns to construct representation and measure the fitness score between a model-task pair via their representation. The ability to rank relevant PTMs higher than others generalizes to new tasks. With the top-ranked PTM candidates, we further learn to enrich task repr. with their PTM-specific semantics to re-rank the PTMs for better selection. Model Spider balances efficiency and selection ability, making PTM selection like a spider preying on a web. Model Spider exhibits promising performance across diverse model zoos, including visual models and Large Language Models (LLMs). Code is available at https://github.com/zhangyikaii/Model-Spider.