Self-Supervised Representation Learning as Mutual Information Maximization

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2510.01345v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Self-supervised representation learning (SSRL) has demonstrated remarkable empirical success, yet its underlying principles remain insufficiently understood. While recent works attempt to unify SSRL methods by examining their information-theoretic objectives or summarizing their heuristics for preventing representation collapse, architectural elements like predictor networks, stop-gradient operations, and statistical regularizers are often viewed as empirically motivated additions. In this paper, we adopt a first-principles approach and investigate whether the learning objective of an SSRL algorithm dictates its possible optimization strategies and model design choices. In particular, by starting from a variational mutual information (MI)