aiqbench analysis
This paper addresses a structural degeneracy in unsupervised representational alignment where symmetric stimulus geometries prevent unique identification of model representations, regardless of data volume. The authors propose a lightweight design-time diagnostic based on group theory that eliminates catastrophic alignment failures without requiring access to learned weights or extensive retraining. By enforcing asymmetric feature designs before data collection, this method ensures robust correspondence recovery across various modalities like color and motion.
More Data Cannot Break a Symmetry: Identifiability by Design
arXiv:2608.27651v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Unsupervised representational alignment recovers a stimulus-by-stimulus correspondence from geometry alone, but the automorphism group of the stimulus geometry bounds what any such alignment can identify, before data exist. The obvious diagnostic for this degeneracy, the cheapest non-identity relabelling, ranks two published designs in the wrong order, because dense sampling creates near-duplicates whose transposition is nearly free. We turn this known invariance (Demetci et al., 2024) into a design-time diagnostic and intervention. In colour, where candidate geometries have closed form, we show that the failure is structural: sixty-four times the restart budget leaves a symmetric design unmoved while an asymmetric set at the same N recovers every time. Discriminating representational models and recovering a correspondence are essentially uncorrelated objectives (r = -0.02 over 3,000 subsets). Choosing nine colours by this diagnostic alone, without consulting any learned representation, moves all 93 model representations away from the degenerate point and cuts catastrophic alignment failures from 75% to 2% with the models, the layers, N and the solver all held fixed. The same risk arises wherever a regular design meets its candidate geometry's isometry group, including evenly spaced orientations, tones, or motion directions, and the check costs one function call before data collection.
Abstract:Unsupervised representational alignment recovers a stimulus-by-stimulus correspondence from geometry alone, but the automorphism group of the stimulus geometry bounds what any such alignment can identify, before data exist. The obvious diagnostic for this degeneracy, the cheapest non-identity relabelling, ranks two published designs in the wrong order, because dense sampling creates near-duplicates whose transposition is nearly free. We turn this known invariance (Demetci et al., 2024) into a design-time diagnostic and intervention. In colour, where candidate geometries have closed form, we show that the failure is structural: sixty-four times the restart budget leaves a symmetric design unmoved while an asymmetric set at the same N recovers every time. Discriminating representational models and recovering a correspondence are essentially uncorrelated objectives (r = -0.02 over 3,000 subsets). Choosing nine colours by this diagnostic alone, without consulting any learned representation, moves all 93 model representations away from the degenerate point and cuts catastrophic alignment failures from 75% to 2% with the models, the layers, N and the solver all held fixed. The same risk arises wherever a regular design meets its candidate geometry's isometry group, including evenly spaced orientations, tones, or motion directions, and the check costs one function call before data collection.
Machine Learning (cs.LG)
arXiv:2608.27651 [cs.LG]
(or arXiv:2608.27651v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.27651 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 293 words
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