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Efficient communication requires balancing informativity and simplicity when encoding meanings. The Information Bottleneck (IB) framework captures this trade-off formally, predicting that natural language systems cluster near an optimal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Antoine Taroni , Ludovic Moncla , Frederique Laforest

Information bottleneck (IB) is a method for extracting information from one random variable $X$ that is relevant for predicting another random variable $Y$. To do so, IB identifies an intermediate "bottleneck" variable $T$ that has low…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-11-22 Artemy Kolchinsky , Brendan D. Tracey , Steven Van Kuyk

Deep neural networks suffer from poor generalization to unseen environments when the underlying data distribution is different from that in the training set. By learning minimum sufficient representations from training data, the information…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-13 Francesco Alesiani , Shujian Yu , Xi Yu

The information bottleneck (IB) principle has been adopted to explain deep learning in terms of information compression and prediction, which are balanced by a trade-off hyperparameter. How to optimize the IB principle for better robustness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-04 Penglong Zhai , Shihua Zhang

In this work, we generalize the information bottleneck (IB) approach to the multi-view learning context. The exponentially growing complexity of the optimal representation motivates the development of two novel formulations with more…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Teng-Hui Huang , Aly El Gamal , Hesham El Gamal

Information bottleneck (IB) is a paradigm to extract information in one target random variable from another relevant random variable, which has aroused great interest due to its potential to explain deep neural networks in terms of…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2023-08-23 Lingyi Chen , Shitong Wu , Wenhao Ye , Huihui Wu , Hao Wu , Wenyi Zhang , Bo Bai , Yining Sun

The information bottleneck (IB) method offers an attractive framework for understanding representation learning, however its applications are often limited by its computational intractability. Analytical characterization of the IB method is…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2023-04-03 Vudtiwat Ngampruetikorn , David J. Schwab

The pursuit of interpretable artificial intelligence has led to significant advancements in the development of methods that aim to explain the decision-making processes of complex models, such as deep learning systems. Among these methods,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Yihao Zhang

The Information Bottleneck (IB) principle offers a compelling theoretical framework to understand how neural networks (NNs) learn. However, its practical utility has been constrained by unresolved theoretical ambiguities and significant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Charles Westphal , Stephen Hailes , Mirco Musolesi

Maintaining efficient semantic representations of the environment is a major challenge both for humans and for machines. While human languages represent useful solutions to this problem, it is not yet clear what computational principle…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-08-13 Noga Zaslavsky , Charles Kemp , Terry Regier , Naftali Tishby

Inference capabilities of machine learning (ML) systems skyrocketed in recent years, now playing a pivotal role in various aspect of society. The goal in statistical learning is to use data to obtain simple algorithms for predicting a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-04 Ziv Goldfeld , Yury Polyanskiy

Information Bottleneck (IB) based multi-view learning provides an information theoretic principle for seeking shared information contained in heterogeneous data descriptions. However, its great success is generally attributed to estimate…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Xudong Tian , Zhizhong Zhang , Cong Wang , Wensheng Zhang , Yanyun Qu , Lizhuang Ma , Zongze Wu , Yuan Xie , Dacheng Tao

The Information Bottleneck (IB) framework is a general characterization of optimal representations obtained using a principled approach for balancing accuracy and complexity. Here we present a new framework, the Dual Information Bottleneck…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Zoe Piran , Ravid Shwartz-Ziv , Naftali Tishby

Deep learning representations are often difficult to interpret, which can hinder their deployment in sensitive applications. Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) have emerged as a promising approach to mitigate this issue by learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Antonio Almudévar , José Miguel Hernández-Lobato , Alfonso Ortega

The Information Bottleneck (IB) objective uses information theory to formulate a task-performance versus robustness trade-off. It has been successfully applied in the standard discriminative classification setting. We pose the question…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-13 Lynton Ardizzone , Radek Mackowiak , Carsten Rother , Ullrich Köthe

Information Bottlenecks (IBs) learn representations that generalize to unseen data by information compression. However, existing IBs are practically unable to guarantee generalization in real-world scenarios due to the vacuous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-01 Yilin Lyu , Xin Liu , Mingyang Song , Xinyue Wang , Yaxin Peng , Tieyong Zeng , Liping Jing

A central challenge for cognitive science is to explain how abstract concepts are acquired from limited experience. This has often been framed in terms of a dichotomy between connectionist and symbolic cognitive models. Here, we highlight a…

The Information Bottleneck (IB) principle offers an information-theoretic framework for analyzing the training process of deep neural networks (DNNs). Its essence lies in tracking the dynamics of two mutual information (MI) values: between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-10 Ivan Butakov , Alexander Tolmachev , Sofia Malanchuk , Anna Neopryatnaya , Alexey Frolov , Kirill Andreev

Benefiting from large-scale pretrained vision language models (VLMs), the performance of visual question answering (VQA) has approached human oracles. However, finetuning such models on limited data often suffers from overfitting and poor…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Jingjing Jiang , Ziyi Liu , Nanning Zheng

The Information Bottleneck (IB) principle facilitates effective representation learning by preserving label-relevant information while compressing irrelevant information. However, its strong reliance on accurate labels makes it inherently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Yi Huang , Qingyun Sun , Yisen Gao , Haonan Yuan , Xingcheng Fu , Jianxin Li