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NeurIPS 2023

Geometry-Aware Adaptation for Pretrained Models

Conference Paper Main Conference Track Artificial Intelligence · Machine Learning

Abstract

Machine learning models---including prominent zero-shot models---are often trained on datasets whose labels are only a small proportion of a larger label space. Such spaces are commonly equipped with a metric that relates the labels via distances between them. We propose a simple approach to exploit this information to adapt the trained model to reliably predict new classes---or, in the case of zero-shot prediction, to improve its performance---without any additional training. Our technique is a drop-in replacement of the standard prediction rule, swapping $\text{argmax}$ with the Fréchet mean. We provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis for this approach, studying (i) learning-theoretic results trading off label space diameter, sample complexity, and model dimension, (ii) characterizations of the full range of scenarios in which it is possible to predict any unobserved class, and (iii) an optimal active learning-like next class selection procedure to obtain optimal training classes for when it is not possible to predict the entire range of unobserved classes. Empirically, using easily-available external metrics, our proposed approach, Loki, gains up to 29. 7% relative improvement over SimCLR on ImageNet and scales to hundreds of thousands of classes. When no such metric is available, Loki can use self-derived metrics from class embeddings and obtains a 10. 5% improvement on pretrained zero-shot models such as CLIP.

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Context

Venue
Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
Archive span
1987-2025
Indexed papers
30776
Paper id
724524765507751619
v2026.09.13