English

SNAP: A Self-Consistent Agreement Principle with Application to Robust Computation

Machine Learning 2026-02-03 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

We introduce SNAP (Self-coNsistent Agreement Principle), a self-supervised framework for robust computation based on mutual agreement. Based on an Agreement-Reliability Hypothesis SNAP assigns weights that quantify agreement, emphasizing trustworthy items and downweighting outliers without supervision or prior knowledge. A key result is the Exponential Suppression of Outlier Weights, ensuring that outliers contribute negligibly to computations, even in high-dimensional settings. We study properties of SNAP weighting scheme and show its practical benefits on vector averaging and subspace estimation. Particularly, we demonstrate that non-iterative SNAP outperforms the iterative Weiszfeld algorithm and two variants of multivariate median of means. SNAP thus provides a flexible, easy-to-use, broadly applicable approach to robust computation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.02013,
  title  = {SNAP: A Self-Consistent Agreement Principle with Application to Robust Computation},
  author = {Xiaoyi Jiang and Andreas Nienkötter},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.02013},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:31:40.497Z