Neural Representations have recently been shown to effectively reconstruct a wide range of signals from 3D meshes and shapes to images and videos. We show that, when adapted correctly, neural representations can be used to directly represent the weights of a pre-trained convolutional neural network, resulting in a Neural Representation for Neural Networks (NeRN). Inspired by coordinate inputs of previous neural representation methods, we assign a coordinate to each convolutional kernel in our network based on its position in the architecture, and optimize a predictor network to map coordinates to their corresponding weights. Similarly to the spatial smoothness of visual scenes, we show that incorporating a smoothness constraint over the original network's weights aids NeRN towards a better reconstruction. In addition, since slight perturbations in pre-trained model weights can result in a considerable accuracy loss, we employ techniques from the field of knowledge distillation to stabilize the learning process. We demonstrate the effectiveness of NeRN in reconstructing widely used architectures on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet. Finally, we present two applications using NeRN, demonstrating the capabilities of the learned representations. In the last decade, neural networks have proven to be very effective at learning representations over a wide variety of domains. Recently, NeRF (Mildenhall et al., 2020) demonstrated that a relatively simple neural network can directly learn to represent a 3D scene.

Recent breakthroughs in text-guided image generation have led to remarkable progress in the field of 3D synthesis from text. By optimizing neural radiance fields (NeRF) directly from text, recent methods are able to produce remarkable results. Yet, these methods are limited in their control of each object's placement or appearance, as they represent the scene as a whole. This can be a major issue in scenarios that require refining or manipulating objects in the scene. To remedy this deficit, we propose a novel GlobalLocal training framework for synthesizing a 3D scene using object proxies. A proxy represents the object's placement in the generated scene and optionally defines its coarse geometry. The key to our approach is to represent each object as an independent NeRF. We alternate between optimizing each NeRF on its own and as part of the full scene. Thus, a complete representation of each object can be learned, while also creating a harmonious scene with style and lighting match. We show that using proxies allows a wide variety of editing options, such as adjusting the placement of each independent object, removing objects from a scene, or refining an object. Our results show that Set-the-Scene offers a powerful solution for scene synthesis and manipulation, filling a crucial gap in controllable text-to-3D synthesis.

SEBOOST applies a secondary optimization process in the subspace spanned by the last steps and descent directions. The method was inspired by the SESOP optimization method, and has been adapted for the stochastic learning. It can be applied on top of any existing optimization method with no need to tweak the internal algorithm. We show that the method is able to boost the performance of different algorithms, and make them more robust to changes in their hyper-parameters. As the boosting steps of SEBOOST are applied between large sets of descent steps, the additional subspace optimization hardly increases the overall computational burden. We introduce hyper-parameters that control the balance between the baseline method and the secondary optimization process. The method was evaluated on several deep learning tasks, demonstrating significant improvement in performance. Video presentation is given in [15]

We present SEBOOST, a technique for boosting the performance of existing stochastic optimization methods. SEBOOST applies a secondary optimization process in the subspace spanned by the last steps and descent directions. The method was inspired by the SESOP optimization method for large-scale problems, and has been adapted for the stochastic learning framework. It can be applied on top of any existing optimization method with no need to tweak the internal algorithm. We show that the method is able to boost the performance of different algorithms, and make them more robust to changes in their hyper-parameters. As the boosting steps of SEBOOST are applied between large sets of descent steps, the additional subspace optimization hardly increases the overall computational burden. We introduce two hyper-parameters that control the balance between the baseline method and the secondary optimization process. The method was evaluated on several deep learning tasks, demonstrating promising results.