{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/empirical-evaluation-of-pre-trained","title":"Empirical Evaluation of Pre-trained Transformers for Human-Level NLP: The Role of Sample Size and Dimensionality","arxiv_id":"2105.03484","date":"2021-05-07","proceeding":"NAACL 2021 4","authors":["Adithya V Ganesan","Matthew Matero","Aravind Reddy Ravula","Huy Vu","H. Andrew Schwartz"],"abstract":"In human-level NLP tasks, such as predicting mental health, personality, or demographics, the number of observations is often smaller than the standard 768+ hidden state sizes of each layer within modern transformer-based language models, limiting the ability to effectively leverage transformers. Here, we provide a systematic study on the role of dimension reduction methods (principal components analysis, factorization techniques, or multi-layer auto-encoders) as well as the dimensionality of embedding vectors and sample sizes as a function of predictive performance. We first find that fine-tuning large models with a limited amount of data pose a significant difficulty which can be overcome with a pre-trained dimension reduction regime. RoBERTa consistently achieves top performance in human-level tasks, with PCA giving benefit over other reduction methods in better handling users that write longer texts. Finally, we observe that a majority of the tasks achieve results comparable to the best performance with just $\\frac{1}{12}$ of the embedding dimensions.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.03484v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2105.03484v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"empirical-evaluation-of-pre-trained","repo_url":"https://github.com/adithya8/ContextualEmbeddingDR","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"dimensionality-reduction","task_name":"Dimensionality Reduction"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"attention-dropout","method_name":"Attention Dropout"},{"method_slug":"bert","method_name":"BERT"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"linear-warmup-with-linear-decay","method_name":"Linear Warmup With Linear Decay"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"pca","method_name":"PCA"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"roberta","method_name":"RoBERTa"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"weight-decay","method_name":"Weight Decay"},{"method_slug":"wordpiece","method_name":"WordPiece"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2105.03484","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}