让极稀疏嵌入真正可用,提升效率与性能
CSRv2: Unlocking Ultra-Sparse Embeddings
- 通过渐进式稀疏训练稳定极稀疏学习
- k=2时准确率提升14%,死神经元从80%降至20%
- 适合需要实时和边缘部署的高效AI系统
在大模型时代,嵌入质量直接影响下游任务表现与系统能力。现有密集嵌入维度高,导致存储、内存和推理延迟成本巨大。对比稀疏表示(CSR)虽可生成高维但稀疏的向量,但在超稀疏场景下(超过80%神经元失效)性能严重退化,效率潜力未被释放。本文提出CSRv2,一种原则性训练方法:通过渐进k退火稳定稀疏学习,利用监督对比目标提升表征质量,并通过全骨干微调确保端到端适应性。CSRv2将死神经元比例从80%降至20%,在k=2时实现14%准确率提升,使极稀疏嵌入性能媲美于k=8的CSR和32维的MRL。在保持相当性能的同时,相比MRL提速7倍,计算与内存效率较密集嵌入提升最高达300倍。跨文本与视觉任务实验表明,当k=4时,文本/视觉分别优于CSR 7%/4%;k=2时差距扩大至14%/6%。该方法使极端稀疏嵌入成为现实,拓展了实时与边缘部署AI系统的可能性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
In the era of large foundation models, the quality of embeddings has become a central determinant of downstream task performance and overall system capability. Yet widely used dense embeddings are often extremely high-dimensional, incurring substantial costs in storage, memory, and inference latency. To address these, Contrastive Sparse Representation (CSR) is recently proposed as a promising direction, mapping dense embeddings into high-dimensional but k-sparse vectors, in contrast to compact dense embeddings such as Matryoshka Representation Learning (MRL). Despite its promise, CSR suffers severe degradation in the ultra-sparse regime, where over 80% of neurons remain inactive, leaving much of its efficiency potential unrealized. In this paper, we introduce CSRv2, a principled training approach designed to make ultra-sparse embeddings viable. CSRv2 stabilizes sparsity learning through progressive k-annealing, enhances representational quality via supervised contrastive objectives, and ensures end-to-end adaptability with full backbone finetuning. CSRv2 reduces dead neurons from 80% to 20% and delivers a 14% accuracy gain at k=2, bringing ultra-sparse embeddings on par with CSR at k=8 and MRL at 32 dimensions, all with only two active features. While maintaining comparable performance, CSRv2 delivers a 7x speedup over MRL, and yields up to 300x improvements in compute and memory efficiency relative to dense embeddings in text representation. Extensive experiments across text and vision demonstrate that CSRv2 makes ultra-sparse embeddings practical without compromising performance, where CSRv2 achieves 7%/4% improvement over CSR when k=4 and further increases this gap to 14%/6% when k=2 in text/vision representation. By making extreme sparsity viable, CSRv2 broadens the design space for real-time and edge-deployable AI systems where both embedding quality and efficiency are critical.
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