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Self-supervised contrastive learning performs non-linear system identification

Machine Learning 2025-06-03 v2 Machine Learning

Abstract

Self-supervised learning (SSL) approaches have brought tremendous success across many tasks and domains. It has been argued that these successes can be attributed to a link between SSL and identifiable representation learning: Temporal structure and auxiliary variables ensure that latent representations are related to the true underlying generative factors of the data. Here, we deepen this connection and show that SSL can perform system identification in latent space. We propose dynamics contrastive learning, a framework to uncover linear, switching linear and non-linear dynamics under a non-linear observation model, give theoretical guarantees and validate them empirically.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2410.14673,
  title  = {Self-supervised contrastive learning performs non-linear system identification},
  author = {Rodrigo González Laiz and Tobias Schmidt and Steffen Schneider},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.14673},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Published as a conference paper at the Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2025)