用统计物理方法研究语义压缩,揭示压缩的相变规律。
Statistical Mechanics of Semantic Compression
- 将语义空间建模为欧氏向量空间,用欧氏距离衡量语义相似性
- 发现语义压缩存在一阶相变(有损/无损)和连续交叉(提取/抽象)
- 模拟退火与贪心算法在典型情况下接近最优,计算复杂但可解
语义压缩的核心问题是:在保持语义不变的前提下最小化消息长度。与传统压缩不同,其失真度量不基于比特层面,而是抽象的语义空间。受认知神经科学与机器学习启发,本文将语义空间建模为连续的欧氏向量空间,将语音、图像或概念映射为高维实向量,其位置决定语义关系。因此,语义相似性自然由欧氏距离定义。本文将最小长度语义保真的优化问题转化为自旋玻璃哈密顿量,并通过复制理论求解统计力学问题,绘制出复制对称相图。结果显示,存在从有损到无损压缩的一阶相变,以及从提取式到抽象式压缩的连续交叉。最后通过模拟退火与贪心算法进行数值模拟,表明虽然最坏情况下的语义压缩是计算困难的,但在典型情况下存在高效算法能实现近似最优性能。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The basic problem of semantic compression is to minimize the length of a message while preserving its meaning. This differs from classical notions of compression in that the distortion is not measured directly at the level of bits, but rather in an abstract semantic space. In order to make this precise, we take inspiration from cognitive neuroscience and machine learning and model semantic space as a continuous Euclidean vector space. In such a space, stimuli like speech, images, or even ideas, are mapped to high-dimensional real vectors, and the location of these embeddings determines their meaning relative to other embeddings. This suggests that a natural metric for semantic similarity is just the Euclidean distance, which is what we use in this work. We map the optimization problem of determining the minimal-length, meaning-preserving message to a spin glass Hamiltonian and solve the resulting statistical mechanics problem using replica theory. We map out the replica symmetric phase diagram, identifying distinct phases of semantic compression: a first-order transition occurs between lossy and lossless compression, whereas a continuous crossover is seen from extractive to abstractive compression. We conclude by showing numerical simulations of compressions obtained by simulated annealing and greedy algorithms, and argue that while the problem of finding a meaning-preserving compression is computationally hard in the worst case, there exist efficient algorithms which achieve near optimal performance in the typical case.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。