# DR-SNE: Density-Regularized Stochastic Neighbor Embedding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.02060 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02060/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Fashion-MNIST: a Novel Image Dataset for Benchmarking Machine Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07747/) (2017)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [Computational Optimal Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.00567/) (2018)
- [Visualizing Large-scale and High-dimensional Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.00370/) (2016)
- [Efficient Algorithms for t-distributed Stochastic Neighborhood Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.09005/) (2017)
- [TriMap: Large-scale Dimensionality Reduction Using Triplets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.00204/) (2019)
- [Prior Distribution and Model Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05485/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Dimensionality-reduction methods such as t-SNE preserve local neighborhood structure but can substantially distort the local distribution of data. We introduce Density-Regularized Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (DR-SNE), which augments stochastic neighbor embedding with a regularizer that directly aligns normalized inverse-neighborhood-scale profiles between the original and embedding spaces. The resulting objective preserves relative local concentration while remaining invariant to global rescaling of the embedding. Across real and synthetic datasets, DR-SNE generally improves preservation of the targeted concentration profile while maintaining controlled levels of neighborhood fidelity. Experiments reveal a consistent empirical trade-off between concentration preservation and neighborhood fidelity as the regularization strength varies. These results position DR-SNE as a simple extension of SNE for settings in which relative variation in local concentration is an important property of the representation.