Apparatus (100, 120, 300, 304, 320, 330) and method (200, 350) for reducing the dimensionality of embeddings in a
machine learning (ML)
system. In some embodiments, original embeddings (124, 206, 378, 394, 404) from a pre-trained
deep learning model (204, 322, 370, 390) are extracted for a set of data (202, 302), the original embeddings having an initial dimensionality. A set of projection vectors (128) are initialized (208, 352) with a specified dimensionality smaller than the initial dimensionality. A neural network (122, 304, 324, 340) is used to optimize the projection vectors by minimizing a
loss function based on a
similarity matrix (132, 134). The set of original embeddings are thereafter projected (210, 214, 360) onto the optimized projection vectors to obtain a set of reduced-dimensional embeddings (126, 216, 306, 388, 396, 406) with the specified dimensionality. A neural network of an ML
system (308, 380, 392, 408) is thereafter configured using the reduced-dimensional embeddings, such as by a training operation (364) to duplicate operation of the
deep learning model in a smaller latent space. The original embeddings may be single
modal or multimodal embeddings.