Cerium Delta

Beyond visualization. Toward measurable neural architecture behavior.

Click the release / pre-release badges above to see what shipped and what's currently in development — each links to demo assets and source for that milestone.

What Cerium Delta Is

Cerium Delta is not a neural-network drawing tool. Most architecture visualizers answer "what does the model look like?" — a static diagram, useful for documentation but silent on behavior.

Cerium Delta asks a different question:

How is the model behaving — right now, as it learns?

It combines model-state extraction, numerical analysis, architecture-aware metrics, and real-time visualization into a single observability layer for neural networks, built on the premise that a model in training is a dynamic system, not a checkpoint.

The Problem

Standard evaluation stops at the outcome:

Did the loss decrease?
Did accuracy improve?
Did the model generalize?

It rarely answers the process questions a developer actually needs when something breaks:

Which layer changed?
Which layer stopped contributing?
Where did the signal weaken?
Which neurons became inactive?
Did the architecture learn a useful representation?
Did the model become more or less stable during training?

Cerium Delta exists to provide measurements that make these questions answerable.

A Simple Mental Model

Think of a neural network as a machine with many moving components. Traditional evaluation looks at the machine's final output. Cerium Delta inspects the machine while it runs — neuron activity, layer behavior, parameter change, gradient behavior, information propagation — and turns those observations into measurements comparable across layers, training stages, and models.

For researchers and engineers, the same idea is an observability layer over neural architectures.

Neural Activity

Cerium Delta analyzes internal behavior including:

• Neuron activity and inactivity
• Dead / saturated neurons
• Activation distributions
• Gradient propagation
• Weight evolution
• Dropout behavior
• Layer utilization

These are the lower-level observations from which higher-level analysis is built.

Architecture-Level Analysis

Individual values are rarely enough on their own. Cerium Delta analyzes how components behave relative to the rest of the architecture — moving from "this tensor changed" to "this component changed significantly relative to the rest of the architecture." That distinction is central to the project.

From Measurements to Meaning

Cerium Delta's current metrics translate internal model state into comparable measures of neural behavior:

Layer Contribution Score (LCS)

Investigates whether a layer contributes meaningfully to the network, using a relative rather than absolute formulation — large weights alone don't imply importance.

Sensitivity

Measures the responsiveness of a quantity to local or parameter-level perturbation, independent of its raw magnitude.

Evolution

Tracks state change relative to a reference point across training, making the learning trajectory itself observable rather than only the endpoint.

Relative Measurement Matters

A large layer naturally has more parameters than a small one — a large raw value doesn't automatically mean a component is more important. Cerium Delta leans on relative analysis, including percentile-based comparisons and statistical filtering, so components are judged against an appropriate reference population rather than in isolation.

Ranking provides context; raw measurements preserve precision.

Neural Vitality

A central research direction: is a neural component actively participating in learning, and how does that change over time? LCS, Sensitivity, and Evolution each offer a different lens on the same underlying question — no single metric is treated as a complete verdict; together they form a measurement system rather than a single score.

Why This Is Different From Traditional Metrics

Traditional metrics answer how well is the model performing? Cerium Delta adds how is the architecture behaving while it gets there? — connecting the two views instead of treating them separately.

Research Philosophy

A metric should provide evidence, not mythology.

A score isn't meaningful just because it produces a number. Every Cerium Delta metric is expected to carry:

• A mathematical definition
• A clear interpretation
• Known assumptions
• Comparable outputs
• Reproducible computation
• Empirical validation
• Stated limitations

The goal is measurements researchers can inspect, question, reproduce, and improve — not a black box that "just knows."

Framework Support

Cerium Delta is designed to work across ML ecosystems, with model-state extraction kept separate from the analysis layer so the core metrics stay framework-independent:

• PyTorch
• TensorFlow
• JAX
• scikit-learn
• ONNX

Pipeline:

Model extraction → Internal state → Metric computation
→ Statistical analysis → Interpretation → Visualization

Visualization is only one consumer of the underlying measurements — this separation is deliberate.

Installation

pip install cerium-delta

from cerium_delta.metrics.brain import NVS
# or
from cerium_delta.exporters.dev import bridge

Vision

Observe the internal state
        ↓
Measure component behavior (LCS, Sensitivity, Evolution)
        ↓
Compare components
        ↓
Track evolution
        ↓
Identify meaningful changes
        ↓
Understand architectural behavior

Instead of asking only "did the model learn?", Cerium Delta helps ask:

Which components contributed? Which changed or became underutilized? Where did internal behavior degrade? How did the architecture evolve — and can we measure it systematically?