Weight space learning aims to learn representations of neural network (NN) weights, enabling different downstream tasks. Existing approaches show promising performance, but lacking a way to shape these weight-space representations using information about the datasets the models were trained on, thus limiting downstream applications. We propose WeightCLIP, a method for learning a dataset-aligned latent space for neural networks, where datasets information is induced during training. The NNs are encoded as latent representations using an autoencoder, while dataset samples are encoded using a dataset encoder. The two representations are aligned using a contrastive objective, effectively reshaping the weight-space representations according to the datasets. We demonstrate that such representations can be used for different downstream tasks, including mapping dataset information to a weight-space representation that decode to strong models. In addition, we introduce a latent refinement process for generating models that outperforms standard fine-tuning. Overall, our results demonstrate that explicitly incorporating dataset information improves what can be achieved with weight-space representations across retrieval, generation, and refinement. Code will be available at https://github.com/HSG-AIML/WeightCLIP.
We investigate the potential of weights to serve as effective representations, focusing on neural fields. Our key insight is that constraining the optimization space through a pre-trained base model and low-rank adaptation (LoRA) can induce structure in weight space. Across reconstruction, generation, and analysis tasks on 2D and 3D data, we find that multiplicative LoRA weights achieve high representation quality while exhibiting distinctiveness and semantic structure. When used with latent diffusion models, multiplicative LoRA weights enable higher-quality generation than existing weight-space methods.
Neural network checkpoints have quietly become a large-scale data resource: millions of trained weight vectors now exist, each encoding task-, domain-, and architecture-specific knowledge. This position paper argues that model checkpoints should be treated as a first-class data modality, and that generative modeling in weight space should be standardized as a core machine learning primitive. Recent advances demonstrate that neural weights can be synthesized on demand, often matching fine-tuning performance while reducing adaptation cost by orders of magnitude. We contend that these results reflect an underlying structural fact: high-performing models occupy low-dimensional, highly structured regions of weight space shaped by symmetry, flatness, modularity, and shared subspaces. Building on this view, we organize existing methods into a five-stage pipeline, survey applications where the approach is already practical, and clarify current limits: adapter-scale and conditional generation are advancing rapidly, while unrestricted frontier-scale checkpoint synthesis remains open. Our goal is to shift the community's default mindset from optimizing models per task to sampling models from learned weight distributions, accelerating toward an era in which AI systems routinely improve or create other AI systems.
Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) encode signals as the weights of a coordinate-based neural network and have recently been proposed as an alternative domain for downstream learning. While promising, classification directly in weight space remains challenging due to the high dimensionality and complex structure of INR parameters. Furthermore, the way discriminative information is distributed across INR weights remains poorly understood. We propose a hierarchical Mixture-of-Experts (HMoE) Transformer that processes INR weights using conditional computation aligned with the structure of the underlying implicit network. Coupled with a meta-learning framework that shapes INR parameters for downstream tasks, our model achieves state-of-the-art accuracy across standard benchmarks, ranging from low-resolution datasets to high-resolution ImageNet-1K. To gain insight into how INRs encode discriminative information, we develop weight-space attribution and pruning methods that identify parameters most relevant for classification. These analyses reveal how class-specific structure emerges within INR layers and support the suitability of MoE architectures for weight-space learning. Our approach advances both the performance and interpretability of weight-space classifiers.