The Role of Entropy and Reconstruction for Multi-View Self-Supervised Learning

The mechanisms behind the success of multi-view self-supervised learning (MVSSL) are not yet fully understood. Contrastive MVSSL methods have been studied though the lens of InfoNCE, a lower bound of the Mutual Information (MI). However, the relation between other MVSSL methods and MI remains unclear. We consider a different lower bound on the MI consisting of an entropy and a reconstruction term (ER), and analyze the main MVSSL families through its lens. Through this ER bound, we show that clustering-based methods such as DeepCluster and SwAV maximize the MI. We also re-interpret the…