Contrastive Learning Inverts the Data Generating Process | Robust Machine Learning – Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems

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Research Overview

Comparative Vision Science

Does CLIP's Generalization Performance Mainly Stem from High Train-Test Similarity?

In Search of Forgotten Domain Generalization

Partial Success in Closing the Gap between Human and Machine Vision

Foundations of Machine Learning

Cross-Entropy Is All You Need To Invert the Data Generating Process

Contrastive Learning Inverts the Data Generating Process

Interaction Asymmetry: A General Principle for Learning Composable Abstractions

Mechanistic Interpretability

Measuring Per-Unit Interpretability at Scale Without Humans

Exemplary Natural Images explain CNN Activations better than State-Of-The-Art Feature Visualizations

How Well do Feature Visualizations Support Causal Understanding of CNN Activations?

Robust Machine Learning

Contrastive Learning Inverts the Data Generating Process

3dident

We prove that InfoNCE contrastive learning enables feedforward models to implicitly invert the data generative process, establishing a connection between contrastive learning, generative modeling, and nonlinear ICA. Furthermore, we empirically validate these findings, demonstrating their robustness even under significant deviations from theoretical assumptions~[

].