A Unifying Framework for Representation Learning
Keywords: representation learning; unsupervised learning; clustering; dimensionality reduction; kmeans; contrastive learning; information theory
TL;DR: We unify over 23 methods in contrastive learning, dimensionality reduction, spectral clustering, and supervised learning with a single equation.
Abstract: As the field of representation learning grows, there has been a proliferation of different loss functions to solve different classes of problems. We introduce a single information-theoretic equation that generalizes a large collection of mod- ern loss functions in machine learning. In particular, we introduce a framework that shows that several broad classes of machine learning methods are precisely minimizing an integrated KL divergence between two conditional distributions: the supervisory and learned representations. This viewpoint exposes a hidden information geometry underlying clustering, spectral methods, dimensionality re- duction, contrastive learning, and supervised learning. This framework enables the development of new loss functions by combining successful techniques from across the literature. We not only present a wide array of proofs, connecting over 23 different approaches, but we also leverage these theoretical results to create state-of-the-art unsupervised image classifiers that achieve a +8% improvement over the prior state-of-the-art on unsupervised classification on ImageNet-1K. We also demonstrate that I-Con can be used to derive principled debiasing methods which improve contrastive representation learners.
Primary Area: unsupervised, self-supervised, semi-supervised, and supervised representation learning
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Submission Number: 4622
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