# Learning Shared Representations from Unpaired Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21524 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21524/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 54 of its 89 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [CLIPScore: A Reference-free Evaluation Metric for Image Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08718/) (2021)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks on Graphs with Fast Localized Spectral Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09375/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Flickr30k Entities: Collecting Region-to-Phrase Correspondences for Richer Image-to-Sentence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04870/) (2015)
- [ImageBind: One Embedding Space To Bind Them All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05665/) (2023)
- [VICReg: Variance-Invariance-Covariance Regularization for Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04906/) (2021)
- [StarGAN: Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09020/) (2017)
- [A Generalization of Transformer Networks to Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09699/) (2020)
- [FLAVA: A Foundational Language And Vision Alignment Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04482/) (2021)
- [Contrastive Learning of Medical Visual Representations from Paired Images and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00747/) (2020)
- [VideoCLIP: Contrastive Pre-training for Zero-shot Video-Text Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14084/) (2021)
- [Mind the Gap: Understanding the Modality Gap in Multi-modal Contrastive Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02053/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Graph Transformers with Spectral Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03893/) (2021)
- [Large Dual Encoders Are Generalizable Retrievers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07899/) (2021)
- [Toward Multimodal Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11586/) (2017)
- [High-Fidelity GAN Inversion for Image Attribute Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06590/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [SOTAlign: Semi-Supervised Alignment of Unimodal Vision and Language Models via Optimal Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23353/) (2026)
- [SCoCCA: Multi-modal Sparse Concept Decomposition via Canonical Correlation Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13884/) (2026)
- [CALM: Interpretable Cross-Modal Alignment for Biomarker Discovery from Unpaired Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01656/) (2026)
- [Representation Alignment from a Few Paired Data via Distilled Optimal Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.12781/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Learning shared representations is a primary area of multimodal representation learning. The current approaches to achieve a shared embedding space rely heavily on paired samples from each modality, which are significantly harder to obtain than unpaired ones. In this work, we demonstrate that shared representations can be learned almost exclusively from unpaired data. Our arguments are grounded in the spectral embeddings of the random walk matrices constructed independently from each unimodal representation. Empirical results in computer vision and natural language processing domains support its potential, revealing the effectiveness of unpaired data in capturing meaningful cross-modal relations, demonstrating high capabilities in retrieval tasks, generation, arithmetics, zero-shot, and cross-domain classification. This work, to the best of our knowledge, is the first to demonstrate these capabilities almost exclusively from unpaired samples, giving rise to a cross-modal embedding that could be viewed as universal, i.e., independent of the specific modalities of the data. Our project page: https://shaham-lab.github.io/SUE_page.