Information-Maximized Soft Variable Discretization for Self-Supervised Image Representation Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Niu, Chuang, Xia, Wenjun, Shan, Hongming, Wang, Ge
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Niu, Chuang
Xia, Wenjun
Shan, Hongming
Wang, Ge
author_facet Niu, Chuang
Xia, Wenjun
Shan, Hongming
Wang, Ge
contents Self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a crucial technique in image processing, encoding, and understanding, especially for developing today's vision foundation models that utilize large-scale datasets without annotations to enhance various downstream tasks. This study introduces a novel SSL approach, Information-Maximized Soft Variable Discretization (IMSVD), for image representation learning. Specifically, IMSVD softly discretizes each variable in the latent space, enabling the estimation of their probability distributions over training batches and allowing the learning process to be directly guided by information measures. Motivated by the MultiView assumption, we propose an information-theoretic objective function to learn transform-invariant, non-travail, and redundancy-minimized representation features. We then derive a joint-cross entropy loss function for self-supervised image representation learning, which theoretically enjoys superiority over the existing methods in reducing feature redundancy. Notably, our non-contrastive IMSVD method statistically performs contrastive learning. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of IMSVD on various downstream tasks in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. Thanks to our variable discretization, the embedding features optimized by IMSVD offer unique explainability at the variable level. IMSVD has the potential to be adapted to other learning paradigms. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/niuchuangnn/IMSVD.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_03469
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Information-Maximized Soft Variable Discretization for Self-Supervised Image Representation Learning
Niu, Chuang
Xia, Wenjun
Shan, Hongming
Wang, Ge
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a crucial technique in image processing, encoding, and understanding, especially for developing today's vision foundation models that utilize large-scale datasets without annotations to enhance various downstream tasks. This study introduces a novel SSL approach, Information-Maximized Soft Variable Discretization (IMSVD), for image representation learning. Specifically, IMSVD softly discretizes each variable in the latent space, enabling the estimation of their probability distributions over training batches and allowing the learning process to be directly guided by information measures. Motivated by the MultiView assumption, we propose an information-theoretic objective function to learn transform-invariant, non-travail, and redundancy-minimized representation features. We then derive a joint-cross entropy loss function for self-supervised image representation learning, which theoretically enjoys superiority over the existing methods in reducing feature redundancy. Notably, our non-contrastive IMSVD method statistically performs contrastive learning. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of IMSVD on various downstream tasks in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. Thanks to our variable discretization, the embedding features optimized by IMSVD offer unique explainability at the variable level. IMSVD has the potential to be adapted to other learning paradigms. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/niuchuangnn/IMSVD.
title Information-Maximized Soft Variable Discretization for Self-Supervised Image Representation Learning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.03469