arXiv AI By Yuling Jiao, Wensen Ma, Defeng Sun, Hansheng Wang, Yang Wang

Bringing Generative Learning to Representation Learning: Self-Supervised Transfer Learning as Distribution Matching

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arXiv:2502. 14424v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Most self-supervised learning objectives defend against collapse but leave the target representation law unspecified.

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arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

Learning a Flow to Self-Supervised Representations

The paper introduces Flow-Based Distribution Matching (FBDM), a non‑adversarial framework that learns self‑supervised representations using explicit geometric references and spherical conditional velocity regression. FBDM assigns augmented image views to shared target references while limiting reference usage, and employs an alignment loss to bring view representations closer. Experiments on datasets from CIFAR to ImageNet demonstrate that FBDM performs nearly as well as adversarial DM, outperforms existing SSL methods, and achieves a 1.48‑ to 1.83‑fold speedup with minimal GPU memory increase, while a theoretical analysis bounds downstream misclassification rates in terms of the pretraining loss.

By Yuling Jiao, Wensen Ma, Houduo Qi, Defeng Sun
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 24

Learning a Flow to Self-Supervised Representations

The paper introduces Flow-Based Distribution Matching (FBDM), a non‑adversarial method that learns self‑supervised representations by aligning images to explicit geometric references through spherical conditional velocity regression. By using an ETF‑inspired reference, FBDM allows more reference components than the flow dimension while maintaining geometric separation, and it incorporates an alignment loss to bring augmented views closer together. Experiments on datasets from CIFAR to ImageNet show that FBDM performs nearly as well as adversarial distribution‑matching methods, achieves a 1.48‑ to 1.83‑fold speedup, and offers a theoretical bound on downstream misclassification rates.