CORE MACHINE LEARNING

The SSL Interplay: Augmentations, Inductive Bias, and Generalization

June 26, 2023

Abstract

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a powerful framework to learn representations from raw data without supervision. Yet in practice, engineers face issues such as instability in tuning optimizers and collapse of representations during training. Such challenges motivate the need for a theory to shed light on the complex interplay between the choice of data augmentation, network architecture, and training algorithm. We study such an interplay with a precise analysis of generalization performance on both pretraining and downstream tasks in a theory friendly setup, and highlight several insights for SSL practitioners that arise from our theory.

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AUTHORS

Written by

Bobak Kiani

Vivien Cabannes

Alberto Bietti

Randall Balestriero

Yann LeCun

Publisher

ICML

Research Topics

Core Machine Learning

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