I-Con: A Unifying Framework for Representation Learning
Authors: name: Shaden Alshammari; name: John Hershey; name: Axel Feldmann; name: William T. Freeman; name: Mark Hamilton
Published: 2025-04-23 17:59:01

Abstract: As the field of representation learning grows, there has been a proliferation
of different loss functions to solve different classes of problems. We
introduce a single information-theoretic equation that generalizes a large
collection of modern loss functions in machine learning. In particular, we
introduce a framework that shows that several broad classes of machine learning
methods are precisely minimizing an integrated KL divergence between two
conditional distributions: the supervisory and learned representations. This
viewpoint exposes a hidden information geometry underlying clustering, spectral
methods, dimensionality reduction, contrastive learning, and supervised
learning. This framework enables the development of new loss functions by
combining successful techniques from across the literature. We not only present
a wide array of proofs, connecting over 23 different approaches, but we also
leverage these theoretical results to create state-of-the-art unsupervised
image classifiers that achieve a +8% improvement over the prior
state-of-the-art on unsupervised classification on ImageNet-1K. We also
demonstrate that I-Con can be used to derive principled debiasing methods which
improve contrastive representation learners.