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From the paper:

“Aghajanyan et al. (2020) shows that the pre-trained language models have a low “instrisic dimension” and can still learn efficiently despite a random projection to a smaller subspace.”

Would be great to have an informed practitioner comment (sota) on why we opt for random projection. Is the actual ‘intrinsic’ vector space uncomputable? Too slow to find?



Not an informed/sota practitioner, but isn't this just a standard property of high dimensional spaces?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_projection

> The core idea behind random projection is given in the Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma, which states that if points in a vector space are of sufficiently high dimension, then they may be projected into a suitable lower-dimensional space in a way which approximately preserves the distances between the points.


> Is the actual ‘intrinsic’ vector space uncomputable? Too slow to find?

OMG yes. It's also an unsolved problem, once can approximate it. I've written several non-parametric blind arbitrary dimension DR algorithms and been obsessed with the space most of my life. If you think O(n^2) feels slow, try O(n^3)...:) For more, read about mean shift clustering, or the new hot stuff: topological data analysis/bar codes/mapper algorithm.


Random projects work well in high dimensional spaces, they’re cheap, easy, and require no understanding of the initial space. Part of the point of Lora is efficiency, after all!




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