Meta Models: Models that Model Learning
Peihang Li, Ziming Liu
Every neural-network training run produces not only a model, but also evidence about how models learn. Can these accumulated experiments enable us to predict and compare new training runs before executing them? We study meta-models: models that predict the learning behavior of other models. From this perspective, final-performance prediction, learning-curve prediction, and hyperparameter selection are different queries to the same training response function. We take a first, humble empirical step toward this goal: treating real language-model training records as native numeric data, we find that an off-the-shelf tabular in-context learner, TabPFN, can match or outperform a fine-tuned LLM meta-model in multiple evaluated settings. Whereas recent work fine-tunes LLMs on tokenized configurations at a cost of tens to hundreds of GPU-hours, TabPFN requires seconds of fit-and-predict time without task-specific weight updates. We argue that meta-modeling is better treated as its own numeric modality rather than as a text task for LLMs. Going one step further, augmenting TabPFN with Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) further improves accuracy on selected prediction tasks. Finally, we pre-registered a forecast of the Marin Hero Run, a 535B-parameter public training run, whose ground truth is revealed point by point as training progresses, putting meta-model predictions to the test against training outcomes not yet observed at the time of forecasting.
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