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arXiv Machine Learning By Chenyu Zhu, Ruoyu Zhao, Zhichao Lu

Neural Spectral Capacity: Measuring and Designing Architectures from Network Specification Alone

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The paper introduces Neural Spectral Capacity (NSC), a closed‑form metric derived from the singular‑value spectrum of weight matrices that can be computed solely from a network’s architectural specification. Unlike traditional measures such as #Params and #FLOPs, NSC captures architectural structure (depth, width, head, FFN allocations) and can be evaluated without instantiating the model, data, or gradients. Using a dynamic‑programming solver (NSC‑DP), the authors demonstrate that NSC can efficiently identify architectures that outperform existing training‑free proxies across Transformer and CNN families, and achieve state‑of‑the‑art results in tasks such as WikiText‑103 and commonsense reasoning with LLaMA‑7B. whyItMatters":"NSC provides a fast, architecture‑only proxy that outperforms conventional metrics and training‑free proxies, enabling more effective design and pruning of large models without costly training or data."

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