Paper:
We present a Function Feature Learning (FFL) method that can measure the similarity of non-convex neural networks. The function feature representation provides crucial insights into the understanding of the relations between different local solutions of identical neural networks. Unlike existing methods that use neuron activation vectors over a given dataset as neural network representation, FFL aligns weights of neural networks and projects them into a common function feature space by introducing a chain alignment rule. We investigate the function feature representation on Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), finding that identical neural networks trained with different random initializations on different learning tasks by the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) algorithm can be projected into different fixed points. This finding demonstrates the strong connection between different local solutions of identical neural networks and the equivalence of projected local solutions. With FFL, we also find that the semantics are often presented in a bottom-up way. Besides, FFL provides more insights into the structure of local solutions. Experiments on CIFAR-100, NameData, and tiny ImageNet datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Review:
I first wanted to thank the authors for their proposed approach in this paper. The paper discusses an interesting idea for quantizing the similarity of neural networks, based on weight similarity. However, overall this assumption is based on the fact that similar layers within a particular architecture will learn similar semantics across different runs (and surprisingly authors add tasks to this as well, which I don't understand why this is the case). 
Unfortunately, the paper is hard to read. It is not easy to understand the research questions, and experimental setup. Partly due to overloaded terms, such as “solution” being used for describing multiple different concepts across the paper (solution class, local solution classification, local solution retrieval, none of them particularly well defined in the paper). I highly recommend the authors to describe their findings in a more concrete manner. I did not see any attempts at giving *insights*, mostly numerical comparison. 
My concerns with the methodology of the paper are as follows:
1. What are the findings of the paper? Permutation of the neural networks is certainly an area worth studying. However, in this paper, authors make the assumption that weights across the same layer (say layer #2) are somehow always going to learn similar values (except in permutation) across different runs of the model? Major clarification in this area is required. 
2. I am not quite sure what the term solution class means, or what the authors want the reviewer to believe it means. Please elaborate. Also solution label? This terminology seems a bit obsolete and cumbersome, unless properly defined at the beginning of the paper. 
3. Can you elaborate more on the goals of the experiments? Right now the outcome of the experiments are a bit vague based on lack of hypotheses. 
4. Can you elaborate what the goal of local solution classification is? It is not clear if this is simply the classification accuracy of a trained model, or what is vaguely described in section 3.3
I will make a re-evaluation of the paper after the above questions are answered. Overall, I suggest a rewrite of the paper to make claims, experimental hypotheses and design more clear.