Neural Eigenfunctions Are Structured Representation Learners

Zhijie Deng, Jiaxin Shi, Hao Zhang, Peng Cui, Cewu Lu, Jun Zhu

Primary Area: unsupervised, self-supervised, semi-supervised, and supervised representation learning

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Keywords: unsupervised representation learning, neural eigenfunctions

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Abstract: This paper introduces a structured, adaptive-length deep representation called Neural Eigenmap. Unlike prior spectral methods such as Laplacian Eigenmap that operate in a nonparametric manner, Neural Eigenmap leverages NeuralEF to parametrically model eigenfunctions using a neural network. We show that, when the eigenfunction is derived from positive relations in a data augmentation setup, applying NeuralEF results in an objective function that resembles those of popular self-supervised learning methods, with an additional symmetry-breaking property that leads to structured representations where features are ordered by importance. We demonstrate using such representations as adaptive-length codes in image retrieval systems. By truncation according to feature importance, our method requires up to $16\times$ shorter representation length than leading self-supervised learning ones to achieve similar retrieval performance. We further apply our method to graph data and report strong results on a node representation learning benchmark with more than one million nodes.

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Submission Number: 5448