arXiv Machine Learning

Sketched Linear Contrastive Learning: Approximation, Optimization, and Statistical Scaling

arXiv:2606. 26617v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scaling laws describe how learning performance varies with model size, data size, and compute.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 16

InfoNCE Induces Gaussian Distribution

arXiv:2602. 24012v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Contrastive learning has become a cornerstone of modern representation learning, allowing training with massive unlabeled data for both task-specific and general (foundation) models.

By Roy Betser, Eyal Gofer, Meir Yossef Levi, Guy Gilboa
arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago

Negligible in Size, Significant in Effect: On Scale Vectors in Large Language Models

The paper investigates the often-overlooked scale vectors in large language models, showing that despite their tiny size they are crucial for pre‑training performance. The authors provide theoretical insights that scale vectors mainly aid optimization rather than expressivity, and they analyze how weight decay affects different normalization layers. Building on these findings, they propose lightweight improvements—branch‑specific heterogeneity, better placement, and magnitude‑direction reparameterization—that consistently reduce loss across a range of model sizes and training settings.

By Mingze Wang, Shuchen Zhu, Yuxin Fang, Binghui Li, Kai Shen, Shu Zhong
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 18

BLADE: Scalable Bi-level Adaptive Data Selection for LLM Training

arXiv:2606. 18650v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As Large Language Model (LLM) datasets scale to trillions of tokens, data selection has emerged as a critical frontier to filter out uninformative noise and construct adaptive learning trajectories.

By Jiaxing Wang, Deping Xiang, Jin Xu, Zirui Liu, Zicheng Zhang, Guoqiang Gong, Jun Fang, Chao Liu, Pengzhang Liu, Tongxuan Liu, Ke Zhang, Qixia Jiang
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

Expressivity In Multimodal Contrastive Learning

The paper investigates the expressive power of multimodal contrastive learning architectures by treating them as parameterized families of joint density estimators. It shows that the classic two‑tower CLIP model is a universal approximator for two modalities, while a common extension that sums pairwise similarities fails to approximate arbitrary joint distributions when three or more modalities are involved, though it can match all pairwise conditionals. To address this limitation, the authors introduce Hadamard‑CLIP, which adds a single learned weight vector to restore universal approximation for any number of modalities while retaining CLIP’s efficient retrieval capabilities.

By Andrew Stuart, Florian Wolf