arXiv AI
Sep 18

Pre-train to Gain: Robust Learning Without Clean Labels

The paper proposes a method that first pre‑trains a feature extractor on the target dataset using in‑domain self‑supervised learning (SSL) without labels, then performs standard supervised training on the same noisy dataset. This two‑stage approach eliminates the need for a clean label subset and consistently improves classification accuracy and label‑error detection across synthetic and real‑world noise, especially as noise rates increase. Experiments show that the method matches or surpasses ImageNet and DinoV2 pre‑training, particularly under high noise conditions.

By David Szczecina, Nicholas Pellegrino, Paul Fieguth
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 3

Breaking the Geometric Bottleneck: Contrastive Expansion in Asymmetric Cross-Modal Distillation

The paper investigates how knowledge distillation from Vision Transformers to smaller CNNs can cause dimensional collapse in the student’s representation space. Using SVD and Shannon entropy, the authors show that cosine‑based distillation leads to a drastic reduction in effective rank, while adding an InfoNCE objective can double the rank but harms downstream accuracy due to signal dilution. They further demonstrate that a label‑aware contrastive objective (Supervised Contrastive distillation) can maintain or improve accuracy without unnecessary rank expansion, indicating that effective rank alone is not a reliable indicator of representation quality.

By Kabir Thayani