Skip to content

Functional Degeneracy in Neural Networks: Measurement and Pruning

Aug 2026 · 0 citations · 39 references
Computer Science

TL;DR

This work quantifies functional degeneracy through the behavioral recovery rank, defined as the number of leading behavioral-Hessian eigendirections required to recover a trained model's performance, and finds that structural and magnitude pruning retain more degrees of freedom, even after the task is saturated.

Abstract

A central question in modern machine learning is how much a trained model can be compressed without changing its behavior, to reduce the memory, compute and energy required to deploy it. To study this, we quantify functional degeneracy through the behavioral recovery rank, defined as the number of leading behavioral-Hessian eigendirections required to recover a trained model's performance. Using the behavioral recovery rank as a geometric benchmark for compression, we find that structural and magnitude pruning retain more degrees of freedom, even after the task is saturated. This gap suggests that functional redundancy is distributed across parameter directions and is not exposed by individual weights or neurons.

View source

Similar papers

#artificial intelligence Conference Open access Jun 2018

Gibson Env: Real-World Perception for Embodied Agents

This paper investigates developing real-world perception for active agents, proposes Gibson Environment for this purpose, and showcases a set of perceptual tasks learned therein.

F. Xia, Amir Zamir, Zhi-Yang He et al. · 1,069 citations · ⚡112
#machine learning Review Open access Oct 2014

Software development in startup companies: A systematic mapping study

The results indicate that software engineering work practices are chosen opportunistically, adapted and configured to provide value under the constrains imposed by the startup context.

Nicolò Paternoster, Carmine Giardino, M. Unterkalmsteiner et al. · 394 citations · ⚡54

Diffusion models as plug-and-play priors

The possibility of inferring high-dimensional data inference in a model that consists of a prior and an auxiliary differentiable constraint given some additional information is considered, thereby allowing a range of potential applications in adapting models to new domains and tasks.

Alexandros Graikos, Esmeralda S. Whitammer, N. Jojic et al. · 316 citations · ⚡15

Trajectory Balance: Improved Credit Assignment in GFlowNets

It is proved that any global minimizer of the trajectory balance objective can define a policy that samples exactly from the target distribution, and empirically demonstrate the benefits of the trajectories balance objective for GFlowNet convergence, diversity of generated samples, and robustness to long action sequenc...

Esmeralda S. Whitammer, Moksh Jain, Emmanuel Bengio et al. · 302 citations · ⚡60

KTO: Model Alignment as Prospect Theoretic Optimization

This work proposes a HALO that directly maximizes the utility of generations instead of maximizing the log-likelihood of preferences, and suggests that the best loss depends on the inductive biases most appropriate for a given setting, an oft-overlooked consideration.

Kawin Ethayarajh, Winnie Xu, Niklas Muennighoff et al. · 195 citations · ⚡28

Related blog posts

MIT News · Artificial Intelligence Oct 28, 2026

Making machines that can listen

Professor Paris Smaragdis develops computers with superhuman hearing for applications like speech recognition, music understanding, and environmental monitoring.

MIT News · Artificial Intelligence Oct 23, 2026

Q&A: How AI came to model the “messy” human mind

Assistant Professor Benjamin Lindquist studies how engineers deliberately injected randomness into early AI, giving rise to deep-learning models that sometimes hallucinate.

We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads. See our Cookie Policy.