2025/09/05 by Shone, Jasmine, Li, Zhening, Alshammari, Shaden +2
#Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2509.04734
The Information Contrastive (I-Con) framework revealed that over 23 representation learning methods implicitly minimize KL divergence between data and learned distributions that encode similarities between data points. However, a KL-based loss may be misaligned with the true objective, and properties of KL divergence such as asymmetry and unboundedness may create optimization challenges. We present Beyond I-Con, a framework that enables systematic discovery of novel loss functions by exploring alternative statistical divergences. Key findings: (1) on unsupervised clustering of DINO-ViT embeddings, we achieve state-of-the-art results by modifying the PMI algorithm to use total variation (TV) distance; (2) supervised contrastive learning with Euclidean distance as the feature space metric is improved by replacing the standard loss function with Jenson-Shannon divergence (JSD); (3) on dimensionality reduction, we achieve superior qualitative results and better performance on downstream tasks than SNE by replacing KL with a bounded f-divergence. Our results highlight the importance of considering divergence choices in representation learning optimization.