English

Multi-Way Representation Alignment

Machine Learning 2026-02-09 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

The Platonic Representation Hypothesis suggests that independently trained neural networks converge to increasingly similar latent spaces. However, current strategies for mapping these representations are inherently pairwise, scaling quadratically with the number of models and failing to yield a consistent global reference. In this paper, we study the alignment of M3M \ge 3 models. We first adapt Generalized Procrustes Analysis (GPA) to construct a shared orthogonal universe that preserves the internal geometry essential for tasks like model stitching. We then show that strict isometric alignment is suboptimal for retrieval, where agreement-maximizing methods like Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) typically prevail. To bridge this gap, we finally propose Geometry-Corrected Procrustes Alignment (GCPA), which establishes a robust GPA-based universe followed by a post-hoc correction for directional mismatch. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GCPA consistently improves any-to-any retrieval while retaining a practical shared reference space.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.06205,
  title  = {Multi-Way Representation Alignment},
  author = {Akshit Achara and Tatiana Gaintseva and Mateo Mahaut and Pritish Chakraborty and Viktor Stenby Johansson and Melih Barsbey and Emanuele Rodolà and Donato Crisostomi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.06205},
  year   = {2026}
}