Comment by bigmadshoe
7 hours ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but a zero-shot classifier like Jev is fundamentally different to a classifier with a fixed task (e.g. for safeguards), unless they trained a general purpose system to complete the safeguard task, which seems unlikely.
This whole thing reminds me of DeepMind’s Variational Bayesian Last Layers[0], which never gained much traction in the broader “AI” world, but is a remarkably useful tool. And a relatively obvious one that anyone with experience in SVI and with transformer pretraining, seems to independently rediscover (including me) before finding this paper.
[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.11599
Correct, but zero-shot classifiers are also not new.
But zero-shot classifiers with this level of intelligence, world knowledge, ergonomics, cost profile, and ease of use are new.
I feel like good engineering doesn't just ignore those things, or at least it didn't before recently. Now I guess social media has added a pressure to reduce everything to a hot take.
> Ergonomics, cost profile, and ease of use are new.
Following AI from the academic papers side; jev really feels silly. They one-pass the LLM tranformer stack and tune the output network for a probability value.
(some clever pararellization optimisations to make it viable to offer as an api, since the normal kv cashing no longer works if you oneshot the tranformer)
The largest change is the packaging; An api with a tolken based pricing, and a schema to define the output structure for quick setup.
Previous projects would probably involve installing pytorch, running a converter script on Qwen, and write a fair bit of matrix math to change the output shape.
I'm kinda amused that it took this long though.
An LLM is a zero-shot classifier with a large number of classes. All you need to do is establish what the output means and you can fine-tune an LLM final layer for this task if you like (and others have done). A student of mine did this as an exercise two years ago, and it was cool, but not publishable.
I agree with you on the "ease of use" business though. No one thought to make this sort of thing commercially available.
But there is no hot take here. Jev is not some new paradigm; engineering-wise, it is a trivial modification to the existing pipeline. That doesn't mean it isn't commercially viable.
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They almost certainly would perform worse than more specialized classifiers trained with less data. It’s kind of a paradox of generalization. I think there’s an interesting space where you use generalized models to generate ad hoc specialized classifiers.
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Fixed guard today is not very fixed. For ex, the safeguard qwen released is a full 4b llm model. It has no different to normal llm model arch except tuned for this specific purpose,
So it is tuned specifically to classify content for safeguarding? I'm not familiar with this particular model, but it most likely has a specific classifier head that is tuned for the safeguard task. This is completely different to zero-shot classification.