linear separability
- North America > United States > Wisconsin > Dane County > Madison (0.04)
- North America > United States > New York (0.04)
- North America > United States > Maryland (0.04)
- Asia > Myanmar > Tanintharyi Region > Dawei (0.04)
- North America > United States > Michigan (0.04)
- North America > United States > California > Santa Clara County > Palo Alto (0.04)
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What Can We Learn from Unlearnable Datasets?
In an era of widespread web scraping, unlearnable dataset methods have the potential to protect data privacy by preventing deep neural networks from generalizing. But in addition to a number of practical limitations that make their use unlikely, we make a number of findings that call into question their ability to safeguard data. First, it is widely believed that neural networks trained on unlearnable datasets only learn shortcuts, simpler rules that are not useful for generalization. In contrast, we find that networks actually can learn useful features that can be reweighed for high test performance, suggesting that image protection is not assured. Unlearnable datasets are also believed to induce learning shortcuts through linear separability of added perturbations. We provide a counterexample, demonstrating that linear separability of perturbations is not a necessary condition. To emphasize why linearly separable perturbations should not be relied upon, we propose an orthogonal projection attack which allows learning from unlearnable datasets published in ICML 2021 and ICLR 2023. Our proposed attack is significantly less complex than recently proposed techniques.
Asymptotic analysis of shallow and deep forgetting in replay with Neural Collapse
Lanzillotta, Giulia, Meier, Damiano, Hofmann, Thomas
A persistent paradox in continual learning (CL) is that neural networks often retain linearly separable representations of past tasks even when their output predictions fail. We formalize this distinction as the gap between deep feature-space and shallow classifier-level forgetting. We reveal a critical asymmetry in Experience Replay: while minimal buffers successfully anchor feature geometry and prevent deep forgetting, mitigating shallow forgetting typically requires substantially larger buffer capacities. To explain this, we extend the Neural Collapse framework to the sequential setting. We characterize deep forgetting as a geometric drift toward out-of-distribution subspaces and prove that any non-zero replay fraction asymptotically guarantees the retention of linear separability. Conversely, we identify that the "strong collapse" induced by small buffers leads to rank-deficient covariances and inflated class means, effectively blinding the classifier to true population boundaries. By unifying CL with out-of-distribution detection, our work challenges the prevailing reliance on large buffers, suggesting that explicitly correcting these statistical artifacts could unlock robust performance with minimal replay.
- Europe > United Kingdom > England > Cambridgeshire > Cambridge (0.14)
- North America > Canada > Ontario > Toronto (0.04)
- North America > United States (0.14)
- Europe > Germany > North Rhine-Westphalia > Cologne Region > Aachen (0.04)
- North America > Canada (0.04)
- Europe > Spain > Catalonia > Barcelona Province > Barcelona (0.04)
Emergence of Linear Truth Encodings in Language Models
Ravfogel, Shauli, Yehudai, Gilad, Linzen, Tal, Bruna, Joan, Bietti, Alberto
Recent probing studies reveal that large language models exhibit linear subspaces that separate true from false statements, yet the mechanism behind their emergence is unclear. We introduce a transparent, one-layer transformer toy model that reproduces such truth subspaces end-to-end and exposes one concrete route by which they can arise. We study one simple setting in which truth encoding can emerge: a data distribution where factual statements co-occur with other factual statements (and vice-versa), encouraging the model to learn this distinction in order to lower the LM loss on future tokens. We corroborate this pattern with experiments in pretrained language models. Finally, in the toy setting we observe a two-phase learning dynamic: networks first memorize individual factual associations in a few steps, then -- over a longer horizon -- learn to linearly separate true from false, which in turn lowers language-modeling loss. Together, these results provide both a mechanistic demonstration and an empirical motivation for how and why linear truth representations can emerge in language models.
- Europe > France (0.04)
- North America > United States > Florida > Miami-Dade County > Miami (0.04)
- North America > Dominican Republic (0.04)
Language steering in latent space to mitigate unintended code-switching
Goncharov, Andrey, Kondusov, Nikolai, Zaytsev, Alexey
Multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit unintended code-switching, reducing reliability in downstream tasks. We propose latent-space language steering, a lightweight inference-time method that identifies language directions via PCA on parallel translations and steers token embeddings along these axes to control language identity. Our approach mitigates code-switching while preserving semantics with negligible computational overhead and requires only minimal parallel data for calibration. Empirically, we achieve 95-99\% language classification accuracy using a single principal component and reduce next-token distributional divergence by up to 42% across multiple language pairs on Qwen2.5 and Llama-3.2 models. We further analyze the layer-wise evolution of language representations, revealing that language identity concentrates in final layers with near-perfect linear separability.
- Asia > Thailand > Bangkok > Bangkok (0.05)
- Asia > Indonesia > Bali (0.05)
- North America > Dominican Republic (0.04)
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- North America > United States > New York (0.04)
- North America > United States > Maryland (0.04)
- Asia > Myanmar > Tanintharyi Region > Dawei (0.04)
- North America > United States > Michigan (0.04)
- North America > United States > California > Santa Clara County > Palo Alto (0.04)
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No Alignment Needed for Generation: Learning Linearly Separable Representations in Diffusion Models
Yun, Junno, Alçalar, Yaşar Utku, Akçakaya, Mehmet
Efficient training strategies for large-scale diffusion models have recently emphasized the importance of improving discriminative feature representations in these models. A central line of work in this direction is representation alignment with features obtained from powerful external encoders, which improves the representation quality as assessed through linear probing. Alignment-based approaches show promise but depend on large pretrained encoders, which are computationally expensive to obtain. In this work, we propose an alternative regularization for training, based on promoting the Linear SEParability (LSEP) of intermediate layer representations. LSEP eliminates the need for an auxiliary encoder and representation alignment, while incorporating linear probing directly into the network's learning dynamics rather than treating it as a simple post-hoc evaluation tool. Our results demonstrate substantial improvements in both training efficiency and generation quality on flow-based transformer architectures such as SiTs, achieving an FID of 1.46 on $256 \times 256$ ImageNet dataset.