English

FLARE: Task-agnostic embedding model evaluation through a normalization process

Machine Learning 2026-04-21 v1 Computation and Language

Abstract

When task-specific labels are not available, it becomes difficult to select an embedding model for a specific target corpus. Existing labelless measures based on kernel estimators or Gaussian mixes fail in high-dimensional space, resulting in unstable rankings. We propose a flow-based labelless representation embedding evaluation (FLARE), which utilizes normalized streams to estimate information sufficiency directly from log-likelihood and avoid distance-based density estimation. We give a finite sample boundary, indicating that the estimation error depends on the intrinsic dimension of the data manifold rather than the original embedding dimension. On 11 datasets and 8 embedders, FLARE reached Spearman's ρ\rho of 0.90 under the supervised benchmark and remained stable in high-dimensional embeddings (d3,584d \geq 3{,}584) as the existing labelless baseline collapsed.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.17344,
  title  = {FLARE: Task-agnostic embedding model evaluation through a normalization process},
  author = {Jingzhou Jiang and Yixuan Tang and Yi Yang and Kar Yan Tam},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.17344},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted to Findings of ACL 2026

R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:16:44.171Z