# FANoise: Singular Value-Adaptive Noise Modulation for Robust Multimodal Representation Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20997 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20997/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (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)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12191/) (2024)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Sigmoid Loss for Language Image Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15343/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [LLaVA-OneVision: Easy Visual Task Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03326/) (2024)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [Averaging Weights Leads to Wider Optima and Better Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05407/) (2018)
- [Deep Graph Infomax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10341/) (2018)
- [Co-teaching: Robust Training of Deep Neural Networks with Extremely Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06872/) (2018)
- [Towards General Text Embeddings with Multi-stage Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03281/) (2023)
- [Symmetric Cross Entropy for Robust Learning with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06112/) (2019)
- [Early-Learning Regularization Prevents Memorization of Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.00151/) (2020)
- [VLM2Vec: Training Vision-Language Models for Massive Multimodal Embedding Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05160/) (2024)
- [An efficient framework for learning sentence representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02893/) (2018)
- [GME: Improving Universal Multimodal Retrieval by Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16855/) (2024)
- [UniIR: Training and Benchmarking Universal Multimodal Information Retrievers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17136/) (2023)
- [NLNL: Negative Learning for Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07387/) (2019)
- [Scaling Deep Contrastive Learning Batch Size under Memory Limited Setup](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06983/) (2021)
- [MagicLens: Self-Supervised Image Retrieval with Open-Ended Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19651/) (2024)
- [Learning with Feature-Dependent Label Noise: A Progressive Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07756/) (2021)
- [NEFTune: Noisy Embeddings Improve Instruction Finetuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05914/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Representation learning is fundamental to modern machine learning, powering applications such as text retrieval and multimodal understanding. However, learning robust and generalizable representations remains challenging. While prior work has demonstrated that active noise injection, a form of data augmentation, can enhance encoding performance, most existing methods rely on heuristic or static noise, overlooking the dynamic nature of feature distributions during training. In this work, we systematically study the role of noise in representation learning from both gradient-based and feature distribution perspectives, using InfoNCE loss as a representative example. Focusing on multimodal representation learning, we propose FANoise, a novel feature-adaptive noise injection strategy. By leveraging the dynamics of contrastive learning, FANoise effectively mitigates the negative impacts of noise while preserving its benefits. Under this theoretically grounded framework, comprehensive experiments demonstrate that FANoise consistently improves overall performance on multimodal tasks across various base VLM models.
