Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Evaluating The Intrinsic Similarity Between Neural Networks, Stephen Charles Ashmore

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

We present Forward Bipartite Alignment (FBA), a method that aligns the topological structures of two neural networks. Neural networks are considered to be a black box, because neural networks contain complex model surface determined by their weights that combine attributes non-linearly. Two networks that make similar predictions on training data may still generalize differently. FBA enables a diversity of applications, including visualization and canonicalization of neural networks, ensembles, and cross-over between unrelated neural networks in evolutionary optimization. We describe the FBA algorithm, and describe implementations for three applications: genetic algorithms, visualization, and ensembles. We demonstrate FBA's usefulness by comparing a …