Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Munn, Michael, Wei, Susan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.05612
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866912400304766976
author Munn, Michael
Wei, Susan
author_facet Munn, Michael
Wei, Susan
contents Recent advances in artificial intelligence have been fueled by the development of foundation models such as BERT, GPT, T5, and Vision Transformers. These models are first pretrained on vast and diverse datasets and then adapted to specific downstream tasks, often with significantly less data. However, the mechanisms behind the success of this ubiquitous pretrain-then-adapt paradigm remain underexplored, particularly the characteristics of pretraining checkpoints that enhance downstream adaptation. We introduce a Bayesian model selection criterion, called the downstream free energy, which quantifies a checkpoint's adaptability by measuring the concentration of nearby favorable parameters for the downstream task. We demonstrate that this Bayesian model selection criterion can be effectively implemented without access to the downstream data or prior knowledge of the downstream task. Furthermore, we provide empirical evidence that the criterion reliably correlates with improved finetuning performance, offering a principled approach to predicting model adaptability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_05612
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Bayesian Model Selection Criterion for Selecting Pretraining Checkpoints
Munn, Michael
Wei, Susan
Machine Learning
Recent advances in artificial intelligence have been fueled by the development of foundation models such as BERT, GPT, T5, and Vision Transformers. These models are first pretrained on vast and diverse datasets and then adapted to specific downstream tasks, often with significantly less data. However, the mechanisms behind the success of this ubiquitous pretrain-then-adapt paradigm remain underexplored, particularly the characteristics of pretraining checkpoints that enhance downstream adaptation. We introduce a Bayesian model selection criterion, called the downstream free energy, which quantifies a checkpoint's adaptability by measuring the concentration of nearby favorable parameters for the downstream task. We demonstrate that this Bayesian model selection criterion can be effectively implemented without access to the downstream data or prior knowledge of the downstream task. Furthermore, we provide empirical evidence that the criterion reliably correlates with improved finetuning performance, offering a principled approach to predicting model adaptability.
title A Bayesian Model Selection Criterion for Selecting Pretraining Checkpoints
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.05612