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Autores principales: Alvandi, Ali, Rezaei, Mina
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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Acceso en línea:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.02831
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author Alvandi, Ali
Rezaei, Mina
author_facet Alvandi, Ali
Rezaei, Mina
contents Contrastive learning is among the most popular and powerful approaches for self-supervised representation learning, where the goal is to map semantically similar samples close together while separating dissimilar ones in the latent space. Existing theoretical methods assume that downstream task classes are drawn from the same latent class distribution used during the pretraining phase. However, in real-world settings, downstream tasks may not only exhibit distributional shifts within the same label space but also introduce new or broader label spaces, leading to domain generalization challenges. In this work, we introduce novel generalization bounds that explicitly account for both types of mismatch: domain shift and domain generalization. Specifically, we analyze scenarios where downstream tasks either (i) draw classes from the same latent class space but with shifted distributions, or (ii) involve new label spaces beyond those seen during pretraining. Our analysis reveals how the performance of contrastively learned representations depends on the statistical discrepancy between pretraining and downstream distributions. This extended perspective allows us to derive provable guarantees on the performance of learned representations on average classification tasks involving class distributions outside the pretraining latent class set.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_02831
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Revisiting Theory of Contrastive Learning for Domain Generalization
Alvandi, Ali
Rezaei, Mina
Machine Learning
Statistics Theory
Contrastive learning is among the most popular and powerful approaches for self-supervised representation learning, where the goal is to map semantically similar samples close together while separating dissimilar ones in the latent space. Existing theoretical methods assume that downstream task classes are drawn from the same latent class distribution used during the pretraining phase. However, in real-world settings, downstream tasks may not only exhibit distributional shifts within the same label space but also introduce new or broader label spaces, leading to domain generalization challenges. In this work, we introduce novel generalization bounds that explicitly account for both types of mismatch: domain shift and domain generalization. Specifically, we analyze scenarios where downstream tasks either (i) draw classes from the same latent class space but with shifted distributions, or (ii) involve new label spaces beyond those seen during pretraining. Our analysis reveals how the performance of contrastively learned representations depends on the statistical discrepancy between pretraining and downstream distributions. This extended perspective allows us to derive provable guarantees on the performance of learned representations on average classification tasks involving class distributions outside the pretraining latent class set.
title Revisiting Theory of Contrastive Learning for Domain Generalization
topic Machine Learning
Statistics Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.02831