Towards an Explainable Comparison and Alignment of Feature Embeddings

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Jalali, Mohammad, Nia, Bahar Dibaei, Farnia, Farzan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Jalali, Mohammad
Nia, Bahar Dibaei
Farnia, Farzan
author_facet Jalali, Mohammad
Nia, Bahar Dibaei
Farnia, Farzan
contents While several feature embedding models have been developed in the literature, comparisons of these embeddings have largely focused on their numerical performance in classification-related downstream applications. However, an interpretable comparison of different embeddings requires identifying and analyzing mismatches between sample groups clustered within the embedding spaces. In this work, we propose the \emph{Spectral Pairwise Embedding Comparison (SPEC)} framework to compare embeddings and identify their differences in clustering a reference dataset. Our approach examines the kernel matrices derived from two embeddings and leverages the eigendecomposition of the difference kernel matrix to detect sample clusters that are captured differently by the two embeddings. We present a scalable implementation of this kernel-based approach, with computational complexity that grows linearly with the sample size. Furthermore, we introduce an optimization problem using this framework to align two embeddings, ensuring that clusters identified in one embedding are also captured in the other model. We provide numerical results demonstrating the SPEC's application to compare and align embeddings on large-scale datasets such as ImageNet and MS-COCO. The project page is available at https://mjalali.github.io/SPEC/.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_06231
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards an Explainable Comparison and Alignment of Feature Embeddings
Jalali, Mohammad
Nia, Bahar Dibaei
Farnia, Farzan
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Spectral Theory
While several feature embedding models have been developed in the literature, comparisons of these embeddings have largely focused on their numerical performance in classification-related downstream applications. However, an interpretable comparison of different embeddings requires identifying and analyzing mismatches between sample groups clustered within the embedding spaces. In this work, we propose the \emph{Spectral Pairwise Embedding Comparison (SPEC)} framework to compare embeddings and identify their differences in clustering a reference dataset. Our approach examines the kernel matrices derived from two embeddings and leverages the eigendecomposition of the difference kernel matrix to detect sample clusters that are captured differently by the two embeddings. We present a scalable implementation of this kernel-based approach, with computational complexity that grows linearly with the sample size. Furthermore, we introduce an optimization problem using this framework to align two embeddings, ensuring that clusters identified in one embedding are also captured in the other model. We provide numerical results demonstrating the SPEC's application to compare and align embeddings on large-scale datasets such as ImageNet and MS-COCO. The project page is available at https://mjalali.github.io/SPEC/.
title Towards an Explainable Comparison and Alignment of Feature Embeddings
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Spectral Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06231