title: Embedding models through the lens of Stable Coloring
abstract: Embedding-based approaches find the semantic meaning of tokens in structured data such as natural language, graphs, and even images. To a great degree, these approaches have developed independently in different domains. However, we find a common principle underlying these formulations, and it is rooted in solutions to the stable coloring problem in graphs (Weisfeiler-Lehman isomorphism test). For instance, we find links between stable coloring, distribution hypothesis in natural language processing, and non-local-means denoising algorithm in image signal processing. We even find that stable coloring has strong connections to a broad class of unsupervised embedding models which is surprising at first since stable coloring is generally applied for combinatorial problems. To establish this connection concretely we define a mathematical framework that defines continuous stable coloring on graphs and develops optimization problems to search for them. Grounded on this framework, we show that many algorithms ranging across different domains are, in fact, searching for continuous stable coloring solutions of an underlying graph corresponding to the domain.  We show that popular and widely used embedding models such as Word2Vec, AWE, BERT, Node2Vec, and Vis-Transformer can be understood  as instantiations of our general algorithm that solves the problem of continuous stable coloring. These instantiations offer useful insights into the workings of state-of-the-art models like BERT stimulating new research directions.
authors: Aditya Desai Shashank Sonkar Anshumali Shrivastava Richard Baraniuk
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