Predicting What You Already Know Helps: Provable Self-Supervised LearningDownload PDF

Published: 09 Nov 2021, Last Modified: 05 May 2023NeurIPS 2021 PosterReaders: Everyone
Keywords: statistical learning theory, approximate conditional independence, reconstruction-based self-supervised learning
TL;DR: We prove the sample efficiency of representations learned using reconstruction-based self-supervised learning on downstream tasks under an approximate conditional independence assumption.
Abstract: Self-supervised representation learning solves auxiliary prediction tasks (known as pretext tasks), that do not require labeled data, to learn semantic representations. These pretext tasks are created solely using the input features, such as predicting a missing image patch, recovering the color channels of an image from context, or predicting missing words, yet predicting this \textit{known} information helps in learning representations effective for downstream prediction tasks. This paper posits a mechanism based on approximate conditional independence to formalize how solving certain pretext tasks can learn representations that provably decrease the sample complexity of downstream supervised tasks. Formally, we quantify how the approximate independence between the components of the pretext task (conditional on the label and latent variables) allows us to learn representations that can solve the downstream task with drastically reduced sample complexity by just training a linear layer on top of the learned representation.
Code Of Conduct: I certify that all co-authors of this work have read and commit to adhering to the NeurIPS Statement on Ethics, Fairness, Inclusivity, and Code of Conduct.
Supplementary Material: pdf
15 Replies

Loading