The Impact of Geometric Complexity on Neural Collapse in Transfer Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Munn, Michael, Dherin, Benoit, Gonzalvo, Javier
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Munn, Michael
Dherin, Benoit
Gonzalvo, Javier
author_facet Munn, Michael
Dherin, Benoit
Gonzalvo, Javier
contents Many of the recent remarkable advances in computer vision and language models can be attributed to the success of transfer learning via the pre-training of large foundation models. However, a theoretical framework which explains this empirical success is incomplete and remains an active area of research. Flatness of the loss surface and neural collapse have recently emerged as useful pre-training metrics which shed light on the implicit biases underlying pre-training. In this paper, we explore the geometric complexity of a model's learned representations as a fundamental mechanism that relates these two concepts. We show through experiments and theory that mechanisms which affect the geometric complexity of the pre-trained network also influence the neural collapse. Furthermore, we show how this effect of the geometric complexity generalizes to the neural collapse of new classes as well, thus encouraging better performance on downstream tasks, particularly in the few-shot setting.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_15706
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Impact of Geometric Complexity on Neural Collapse in Transfer Learning
Munn, Michael
Dherin, Benoit
Gonzalvo, Javier
Machine Learning
Many of the recent remarkable advances in computer vision and language models can be attributed to the success of transfer learning via the pre-training of large foundation models. However, a theoretical framework which explains this empirical success is incomplete and remains an active area of research. Flatness of the loss surface and neural collapse have recently emerged as useful pre-training metrics which shed light on the implicit biases underlying pre-training. In this paper, we explore the geometric complexity of a model's learned representations as a fundamental mechanism that relates these two concepts. We show through experiments and theory that mechanisms which affect the geometric complexity of the pre-trained network also influence the neural collapse. Furthermore, we show how this effect of the geometric complexity generalizes to the neural collapse of new classes as well, thus encouraging better performance on downstream tasks, particularly in the few-shot setting.
title The Impact of Geometric Complexity on Neural Collapse in Transfer Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.15706