Word
ablation
Phoneticsab·la·tion
US/ˌəˈbɫeɪʃən/
UK/ɐblˈeɪtiən/
Definition
n. deliberately removing or disabling a component of an AI system to measure its exact purpose and importance.
n. the surgical or experimental removal of a component, layer, or feature from a computational system to isolate and quantify its individual functional contribution.
Examples
“The doctor performed a laser ablation to remove abnormal heart tissue.”
“An ablation study showed that removing the attention mechanism cut translation accuracy in half.”
“Layer ablation experiments demonstrate that mid-tier transformer blocks perform syntactic parsing while final layers specialize in surface token generation.”
Examples
simple
“The doctor performed a laser ablation to remove abnormal heart tissue.”
contextual
“An ablation study showed that removing the attention mechanism cut translation accuracy in half.”
complex
“Layer ablation experiments demonstrate that mid-tier transformer blocks perform syntactic parsing while final layers specialize in surface token generation.”
Real-World Examples
“Essentially, in an ablation study, the changed components are added/removed from the baseline one by one or in groups, and the performance of each of these different "configurations" is then compared to the baseline as well as the final architecture/method.” “Through ablation studies, we demonstrated that object identification accuracy drops by over 70% when object-specific tokens are removed.” Etymology
From Latin ablatio ('a carrying away or removal'), from auferre ('to take away'), from ab- ('away') + ferre ('to carry'). Adopted into experimental AI research from neurobiology.
Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Word family
Domains
Scan code
englishreference.com/q/ablation