# Unveiling the Potential of Probabilistic Embeddings in Self-Supervised Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.18080 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18080/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [A Baseline for Detecting Misclassified and Out-of-Distribution Examples in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02136/) (2016)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [Barlow Twins: Self-Supervised Learning via Redundancy Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03230/) (2021)
- [A Simple Unified Framework for Detecting Out-of-Distribution Samples and Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03888/) (2018)
- [Understanding Contrastive Representation Learning through Alignment and Uniformity on the Hypersphere](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10242/) (2020)
- [LSUN: Construction of a Large-scale Image Dataset using Deep Learning with Humans in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03365/) (2015)
- [Enhancing The Reliability of Out-of-distribution Image Detection in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02690/) (2017)
- [Learning deep representations by mutual information estimation and maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06670/) (2018)
- [VICReg: Variance-Invariance-Covariance Regularization for Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04906/) (2021)
- [Deep Variational Information Bottleneck](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00410/) (2016)
- [Using Self-Supervised Learning Can Improve Model Robustness and Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.12340/) (2019)
- [CSI: Novelty Detection via Contrastive Learning on Distributionally Shifted Instances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08176/) (2020)
- [Understanding Dimensional Collapse in Contrastive Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09348/) (2021)
- [Whitening for Self-Supervised Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06346/) (2020)
- [A Cookbook of Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12210/) (2023)
- [Emergence of Invariance and Disentanglement in Deep Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.01350/) (2017)
- [Scaling and Benchmarking Self-Supervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01235/) (2019)
- [Learning Robust Representations via Multi-View Information Bottleneck](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.07017/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Training for Improved Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.05566/) (2020)
- [Probabilistic Face Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09658/) (2019)
- [Probabilistic Embeddings for Cross-Modal Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.05068/) (2021)
- [To Compress or Not to Compress- Self-Supervised Learning and Information Theory: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09355/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years, self-supervised learning has played a pivotal role in advancing machine learning by allowing models to acquire meaningful representations from unlabeled data. An intriguing research avenue involves developing self-supervised models within an information-theoretic framework, but many studies often deviate from the stochasticity assumptions made when deriving their objectives. To gain deeper insights into this issue, we propose to explicitly model the representation with stochastic embeddings and assess their effects on performance, information compression and potential for out-of-distribution detection. From an information-theoretic perspective, we seek to investigate the impact of probabilistic modeling on the information bottleneck, shedding light on a trade-off between compression and preservation of information in both representation and loss space. Emphasizing the importance of distinguishing between these two spaces, we demonstrate how constraining one can affect the other, potentially leading to performance degradation. Moreover, our findings suggest that introducing an additional bottleneck in the loss space can significantly enhance the ability to detect out-of-distribution examples, only leveraging either representation features or the variance of their underlying distribution.