LiDAR: Sensing Linear Probing Performance in Joint Embedding SSL Architectures

TL;DR

LiDAR is a new metric for evaluating the quality of learned representations in joint embedding SSL architectures, addressing the challenge of assessment without downstream task access, and improving hyperparameter tuning.

Contribution

Introduces LiDAR, a novel metric based on LDA rank, to reliably evaluate and compare representations in joint embedding SSL models.

Findings

LiDAR outperforms existing covariance rank methods in predicting optimal hyperparameters.

LiDAR provides a more robust and intuitive assessment of representation quality.

Empirical results demonstrate LiDAR's effectiveness across different models and datasets.

Abstract

Joint embedding (JE) architectures have emerged as a promising avenue for acquiring transferable data representations. A key obstacle to using JE methods, however, is the inherent challenge of evaluating learned representations without access to a downstream task, and an annotated dataset. Without efficient and reliable evaluation, it is difficult to iterate on architectural and training choices for JE methods. In this paper, we introduce LiDAR (Linear Discriminant Analysis Rank), a metric designed to measure the quality of representations within JE architectures. Our metric addresses several shortcomings of recent approaches based on feature covariance rank by discriminating between informative and uninformative features. In essence, LiDAR quantifies the rank of the Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) matrix associated with the surrogate SSL task -- a measure that intuitively captures the information content as it pertains to solving the SSL task. We empirically demonstrate that LiDAR significantly surpasses naive rank based approaches in its predictive power of optimal hyperparameters. Our proposed criterion presents a more robust and intuitive means of assessing the quality of representations within JE architectures, which we hope facilitates broader adoption of these powerful techniques in various domains.