Distribution Matching for Self-Supervised Transfer Learning

In this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised transfer learning method called Distribution Matching (DM), which drives the representation distribution toward a predefined reference distribution while preserving augmentation invariance. The design of DM results in a learned representation space that is intuitively structured and offers easily interpretable hyperparameters. Experimental results across multiple real-world datasets and evaluation metrics demonstrate that DM performs competitively on target classification tasks compared to existing self-supervised transfer learning methods. Additionally, we provide robust theoretical guarantees for DM, including a population theorem and an end-to-end sample theorem. The population theorem bridges the gap between the self-supervised learning task and target classification accuracy, while the sample theorem shows that, even with a limited number of samples from the target domain, DM can deliver exceptional classification performance, provided the unlabeled sample size is sufficiently large.

Unsupervised Transfer Learning via Adversarial Contrastive Training

Learning a data representation for downstream supervised learning tasks under unlabeled scenario is both critical and challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised transfer learning approach using adversarial contrastive training (ACT). Our experimental results demonstrate outstanding classification accuracy with both fine-tuned linear probe and K-NN protocol across various datasets, showing competitiveness with existing state-of-the-art self-supervised learning methods. Moreover, we provide an end-to-end theoretical guarantee for downstream classification tasks in a misspecified, over-parameterized setting, highlighting how a large amount of unlabeled data contributes to prediction accuracy. Our theoretical findings suggest that the testing error of downstream tasks depends solely on the efficiency of data augmentation used in ACT when the unlabeled sample size is sufficiently large. This offers a theoretical understanding of learning downstream tasks with a small sample size.