ModHiFi: Identifying High Fidelity predictive components for Model Modification

Open weight models, which are ubiquitous, rarely provide access to their training data or loss function. This makes modifying such models for tasks such as pruning or unlearning, which are constrained by this unavailability, an active area of research. Existing techniques typically require gradients or ground-truth labels, rendering them infeasible in settings with limited computational resources. In this work, we investigate the fundamental question of identifying components that are critical to the model's predictive performance, without access to either gradients or the loss function, and with only distributional access such as synthetic data. We theoretically demonstrate that the global error is linearly bounded by local reconstruction errors for Lipschitz-continuous networks such as CNNs and well-trained Transformers (which, contrary to existing literature, we find exhibit Lipschitz continuity). This motivates using the locally reconstructive behavior of component subsets to quantify their global importance, via a metric that we term .