How to Train Neural Field Representations: A Comprehensive Study and Benchmark

Samuele Papa, Riccardo Valperga, David Knigge, Miltiadis Kofinas, Phillip Lippe, Jan-Jakob Sonke, Efstratios Gavves; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 22616-22625

Neural fields (NeFs) have recently emerged as a versatile method for modeling signals of various modalities including images shapes and scenes. Subsequently a number of works have explored the use of NeFs as representations for downstream tasks e.g. classifying an image based on the parameters of a NeF that has been fit to it. However the impact of the NeF hyperparameters on their quality as downstream representation is scarcely understood and remains largely unexplored. This is in part caused by the large amount of time required to fit datasets of neural fields.In this work we propose a JAX-based library that leverages parallelization to enable fast optimization of large-scale NeF datasets resulting in a significant speed-up. With this library we perform a comprehensive study that investigates the effects of different hyperparameters on fitting NeFs for downstream tasks. In particular we explore the use of a shared initialization the effects of overtraining and the expressiveness of the network architectures used. Our study provides valuable insights on how to train NeFs and offers guidance for optimizing their effectiveness in downstream applications. Finally based on the proposed library and our analysis we propose Neural Field Arena a benchmark consisting of neural field variants of popular vision datasets including MNIST CIFAR variants of ImageNet and ShapeNetv2. Our library and the Neural Field Arena will be open-sourced to introduce standardized benchmarking and promote further research on neural fields.