# Divergence-Based Similarity Function for Multi-View Contrastive Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06560 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06560/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5151/) (2013)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [Understanding Contrastive Representation Learning through Alignment and Uniformity on the Hypersphere](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10242/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Multiview Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05849/) (2019)
- [Learning deep representations by mutual information estimation and maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06670/) (2018)
- [Deep Clustering for Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05520/) (2018)
- [Learning Representations by Maximizing Mutual Information Across Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00910/) (2019)
- [Prototypical Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04966/) (2020)
- [Dense Contrastive Learning for Self-Supervised Visual Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09157/) (2020)
- [NormFace: L2 Hypersphere Embedding for Face Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06369/) (2017)
- [Dual Temperature Helps Contrastive Learning Without Many Negative Samples: Towards Understanding and Simplifying MoCo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17248/) (2022)
- [von Mises-Fisher Mixture Model-based Deep learning: Application to Face Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04264/) (2017)
- [Temperature Schedules for Self-Supervised Contrastive Methods on Long-Tail Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13664/) (2023)
- [von Mises-Fisher Loss: An Exploration of Embedding Geometries for Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15718/) (2021)
- [Probabilistic Contrastive Learning for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06726/) (2024)
- [Von Mises-Fisher Loss for Training Sequence to Sequence Models with Continuous Outputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04616/) (2018)
- [Temperature as Uncertainty in Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04403/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent success in contrastive learning has sparked growing interest in more effectively leveraging multiple augmented views of data. While prior methods incorporate multiple views at the loss or feature level, they primarily capture pairwise relationships and fail to model the joint structure across all views. In this work, we propose a divergence-based similarity function (DSF) that explicitly captures the joint structure by representing each set of augmented views as a distribution and measuring similarity as the divergence between distributions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DSF consistently improves performance across diverse tasks, including kNN classification, linear evaluation, transfer learning, and distribution shift, while also achieving greater efficiency than other multi-view methods. Furthermore, we establish a connection between DSF and cosine similarity, and demonstrate that, unlike cosine similarity, DSF operates effectively without the need for tuning a temperature hyperparameter.