提出统一评估框架,超越下游任务看表征的可解释性与适应性。
Towards a Unified Representation Evaluation Framework Beyond Downstream Tasks
- 构建模块化评估协议,量化表征的信息量、等变性、不变性及解耦度。
- 发现下游性能相近的模型在表征属性上差异显著。
- 适合研究表征本质、模型可解释性与基础模型优化的学者。
下游探测是评估模型表征的主流方法,尤其在自监督学习和基础模型日益重要的背景下。然而,该方法仅衡量潜空间中任务相关信息的存在性,忽略了等变性、不变性和解耦性等影响表征可解释性、适应性和实用性的关键属性。尽管已有研究尝试测量这些特性,但尚无统一、可模块化且可解释的评估框架。本文主张超越下游探测进行表征评估,提出标准化协议以量化信息量、等变性、不变性及变化因素的解耦度。我们在图像与语音领域,使用不同架构和预训练方法的多种模型,基于可控制的变化因素进行评估。结果表明,下游性能相似的模型在这些属性上表现截然不同,暗示其下游性能背后的机制存在功能差异,为理解与改进表征开辟了新方向。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Downstream probing has been the dominant method for evaluating model representations, an important process given the increasing prominence of self-supervised learning and foundation models. However, downstream probing primarily assesses the availability of task-relevant information in the model's latent space, overlooking attributes such as equivariance, invariance, and disentanglement, which contribute to the interpretability, adaptability, and utility of representations in real-world applications. While some attempts have been made to measure these qualities in representations, no unified evaluation framework with modular, generalizable, and interpretable metrics exists. In this paper, we argue for the importance of representation evaluation beyond downstream probing. We introduce a standardized protocol to quantify informativeness, equivariance, invariance, and disentanglement of factors of variation in model representations. We use it to evaluate representations from a variety of models in the image and speech domains using different architectures and pretraining approaches on identified controllable factors of variation. We find that representations from models with similar downstream performance can behave substantially differently with regard to these attributes. This hints that the respective mechanisms underlying their downstream performance are functionally different, prompting new research directions to understand and improve representations.
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