In plain words: A new test ranks models that turn objects into numbers by how much information they keep, needing no labeled task data. Its rankings matched how well the models performed on language and biology tasks, so users can pick models to try without costly evaluations.
Abstract · When is an Embedding Model More Promising than Another?
Embedders play a central role in machine learning, projecting any object into numerical representations that can, in turn, be leveraged to perform various downstream tasks. The evaluation of embedding models typically depends on domain-specific empirical approaches utilizing downstream tasks, primarily because of the lack of a standardized framework for comparison. However, acquiring adequately large and representative datasets for conducting these assessments is not always viable and can prove to be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we present a unified approach to evaluate embedders. First, we establish theoretical foundations for comparing embedding models, drawing upon the concepts of sufficiency and informativeness. We then leverage these concepts to devise a tractable comparison criterion (information sufficiency), leading to a task-agnostic and self-supervised ranking procedure. We demonstrate experimentally that our approach aligns closely with the capability of embedding models to facilitate various downstream tasks in both natural language processing and molecular biology. This effectively offers practitioners a valuable tool for prioritizing model trials.
Maxime Darrin, Philippe Formont, Ismail Ben Ayed, Jackie CK Cheung, Pablo Piantanida
arXiv:2406.07640 · cs.LG, cs.AI · submitted Jun 11, 2024 · updated Nov 16, 2024
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