Cross-Entropy Is All You Need To Invert the Data Generating Process

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Reizinger, Patrik, Bizeul, Alice, Juhos, Attila, Vogt, Julia E., Balestriero, Randall, Brendel, Wieland, Klindt, David
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Reizinger, Patrik
Bizeul, Alice
Juhos, Attila
Vogt, Julia E.
Balestriero, Randall
Brendel, Wieland
Klindt, David
author_facet Reizinger, Patrik
Bizeul, Alice
Juhos, Attila
Vogt, Julia E.
Balestriero, Randall
Brendel, Wieland
Klindt, David
contents Supervised learning has become a cornerstone of modern machine learning, yet a comprehensive theory explaining its effectiveness remains elusive. Empirical phenomena, such as neural analogy-making and the linear representation hypothesis, suggest that supervised models can learn interpretable factors of variation in a linear fashion. Recent advances in self-supervised learning, particularly nonlinear Independent Component Analysis, have shown that these methods can recover latent structures by inverting the data generating process. We extend these identifiability results to parametric instance discrimination, then show how insights transfer to the ubiquitous setting of supervised learning with cross-entropy minimization. We prove that even in standard classification tasks, models learn representations of ground-truth factors of variation up to a linear transformation. We corroborate our theoretical contribution with a series of empirical studies. First, using simulated data matching our theoretical assumptions, we demonstrate successful disentanglement of latent factors. Second, we show that on DisLib, a widely-used disentanglement benchmark, simple classification tasks recover latent structures up to linear transformations. Finally, we reveal that models trained on ImageNet encode representations that permit linear decoding of proxy factors of variation. Together, our theoretical findings and experiments offer a compelling explanation for recent observations of linear representations, such as superposition in neural networks. This work takes a significant step toward a cohesive theory that accounts for the unreasonable effectiveness of supervised deep learning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_21869
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Cross-Entropy Is All You Need To Invert the Data Generating Process
Reizinger, Patrik
Bizeul, Alice
Juhos, Attila
Vogt, Julia E.
Balestriero, Randall
Brendel, Wieland
Klindt, David
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Supervised learning has become a cornerstone of modern machine learning, yet a comprehensive theory explaining its effectiveness remains elusive. Empirical phenomena, such as neural analogy-making and the linear representation hypothesis, suggest that supervised models can learn interpretable factors of variation in a linear fashion. Recent advances in self-supervised learning, particularly nonlinear Independent Component Analysis, have shown that these methods can recover latent structures by inverting the data generating process. We extend these identifiability results to parametric instance discrimination, then show how insights transfer to the ubiquitous setting of supervised learning with cross-entropy minimization. We prove that even in standard classification tasks, models learn representations of ground-truth factors of variation up to a linear transformation. We corroborate our theoretical contribution with a series of empirical studies. First, using simulated data matching our theoretical assumptions, we demonstrate successful disentanglement of latent factors. Second, we show that on DisLib, a widely-used disentanglement benchmark, simple classification tasks recover latent structures up to linear transformations. Finally, we reveal that models trained on ImageNet encode representations that permit linear decoding of proxy factors of variation. Together, our theoretical findings and experiments offer a compelling explanation for recent observations of linear representations, such as superposition in neural networks. This work takes a significant step toward a cohesive theory that accounts for the unreasonable effectiveness of supervised deep learning.
title Cross-Entropy Is All You Need To Invert the Data Generating Process
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.21869