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Mapping Networks: CVPR 2026 Best Paper Award Nominee (arxiv.org)
4 points by aurenvale 100 days ago | hide | past | pdf | 1 comment on HN

In plain words: Instead of tuning each weight directly, this trains a tiny vector that a network expands into all the weights, assuming good weights lie on a simple low-dimensional surface. It matched or beat full-weight training on vision and language tasks with 99.5% fewer trainable parameters.

Abstract · Mapping Networks

The escalating parameter counts in modern deep learning models pose a fundamental challenge to efficient training and resolution of overfitting. We address this by introducing the \emph{Mapping Networks} which replace the high dimensional weight space by a compact, trainable latent vector based on the hypothesis that the trained parameters of large networks reside on smooth, low-dimensional manifolds. Henceforth, the Mapping Theorem enforced by a dedicated Mapping Loss, shows the existence of a mapping from this latent space to the target weight space both theoretically and in practice. Mapping Networks significantly reduce overfitting and achieve comparable to better performance than target network across complex vision and sequence tasks, including Image Classification, Deepfake Detection etc, with $\mathbf{99.5\%}$, i.e., around $500\times$ reduction in trainable parameters.

Lord Sen, Shyamapada Mukherjee
arXiv:2602.19134 · cs.CV · submitted Feb 22, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · 10 pages

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very interesting idea and solid work. I wonder if they have tried to apply this to LLM and VLM. Have they open sourced the codebase?