Show Me What You Don't Know: Efficient Sampling from Invariant Sets for Model Validation

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Rousselot, Armand, Wendebourg, Joran, Köthe, Ullrich
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866911538062819328
author Rousselot, Armand
Wendebourg, Joran
Köthe, Ullrich
author_facet Rousselot, Armand
Wendebourg, Joran
Köthe, Ullrich
contents The performance of machine learning models is determined by the quality of their learned features. They should be invariant under irrelevant data variation but sensitive to task-relevant details. To visualize whether this is the case, we propose a method to analyze feature extractors by sampling from their fibers -- equivalence classes defined by their invariances -- given an arbitrary representative. Unlike existing work where a dedicated generative model is trained for each feature detector, our algorithm is training-free and exploits a pretrained diffusion or flow-matching model as a prior. The fiber loss -- which penalizes mismatch in features -- guides the denoising process toward the desired equivalence class, via non-linear diffusion trajectory matching. This replaces days of training for invariance learning with a single guided generation procedure at comparable fidelity. Experiments on popular datasets (ImageNet, CheXpert) and model types (ResNet, DINO, BiomedClip) demonstrate that our framework can reveal invariances ranging from very desirable to concerning behaviour. For instance, we show how Qwen-2B places patients with situs inversus (heart on the right side) in the same fiber as typical anatomy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_21782
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Show Me What You Don't Know: Efficient Sampling from Invariant Sets for Model Validation
Rousselot, Armand
Wendebourg, Joran
Köthe, Ullrich
Machine Learning
The performance of machine learning models is determined by the quality of their learned features. They should be invariant under irrelevant data variation but sensitive to task-relevant details. To visualize whether this is the case, we propose a method to analyze feature extractors by sampling from their fibers -- equivalence classes defined by their invariances -- given an arbitrary representative. Unlike existing work where a dedicated generative model is trained for each feature detector, our algorithm is training-free and exploits a pretrained diffusion or flow-matching model as a prior. The fiber loss -- which penalizes mismatch in features -- guides the denoising process toward the desired equivalence class, via non-linear diffusion trajectory matching. This replaces days of training for invariance learning with a single guided generation procedure at comparable fidelity. Experiments on popular datasets (ImageNet, CheXpert) and model types (ResNet, DINO, BiomedClip) demonstrate that our framework can reveal invariances ranging from very desirable to concerning behaviour. For instance, we show how Qwen-2B places patients with situs inversus (heart on the right side) in the same fiber as typical anatomy.
title Show Me What You Don't Know: Efficient Sampling from Invariant Sets for Model Validation
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.21782