Structuring Semantic Embeddings for Principle Evaluation: A Prototype-Guided Contrastive Learning Approach

Abstract:Reliable post-hoc evaluation asks whether already generated text satisfies a target criterion after generation. In this paper we study a focused frozen-embedding setting using principle-evaluation proxy tasks: toxicity detection, fine-grained emotion categorization, and ordinal review rating. General-purpose text embeddings are widely deployed for such tasks, but broad semantic similarity can place semantically similar yet task-distinct examples in overlapping regions of the representation space. We introduce Prototype-Guided Contrastive Learning (PGCL), a prototype-guided geometric regularization module built on top of frozen text embeddings. The module combines a semantic stream, a prototype-anchor attention stream, supervised contrastive learning, offset-based prototype-margin regularization, and stream regularization to produce a compact task-adapted representation without updating the base encoder. Controlled experiments show that PGCL improves over raw frozen embeddings on all three datasets and gives the clearest direct-baseline margin on AmazonReviews, while remaining competitive with strong direct frozen metric-learning baselines on GoEmotions and ToxicComment. We also add supervised residual-adapter, encoder-LoRA, full fine-tuning, objective ablation, sensitivity, and fully logged few-shot LLM protocol diagnostics to define the boundary of the claim. The theoretical analysis is revised as a sufficient-condition account for prototype-margin behavior under explicit assumptions in the prototype-mapping space, rather than as an unconditional training or final-embedding separation guarantee.

Accepted for publication in Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR). 27 pages

Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2608.15224 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2608.15224v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.15224 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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