A Theory of Contrastive Learning with Natural Images
Why does contrastive learning with simple images and augmentations yield useful representations for downstream tasks? We address this question by analytically computing the optimal representation in terms of a contrastive loss for a range of basic augmentations and any image dataset with stationary statistics. We show that for certain augmentations the optimum can be attained by a CNN whose first layer filters are sinusoids, followed by a pointwise nonlinearity, global average pooling, and a final linear layer that performs partial whitening. We also show that the optimal weights in such CNNs for more complicated augmentations are still sinusoids. The frequencies of the sinusoids and thei...
| Authors | Antonio Torralba, Yair Weiss |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 8 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 8 July 2026 |
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