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Information bottleneck is an information-theoretic principle of representation learning that aims to learn a maximally compressed representation that preserves as much information about labels as possible. Under this principle, two…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2023-11-08 Yuyan Ni , Yanyan Lan , Ao Liu , Zhiming Ma

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

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

The information bottleneck (IB) problem tackles the issue of obtaining relevant compressed representations $T$ of some random variable $X$ for the task of predicting $Y$. It is defined as a constrained optimization problem which maximizes…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-19 Borja Rodríguez-Gálvez , Ragnar Thobaben , Mikael Skoglund

Learning with hidden variables is a central challenge in probabilistic graphical models that has important implications for many real-life problems. The classical approach is using the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-12-12 Gal Elidan , Nir Friedman

Information Bottleneck (IB) is a widely used framework that enables the extraction of information related to a target random variable from a source random variable. In the objective function, IB controls the trade-off between data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-13 Sota Kudo , Naoaki Ono , Shigehiko Kanaya , Ming Huang

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

Extracting relevant information from data is crucial for all forms of learning. The information bottleneck (IB) method formalizes this, offering a mathematically precise and conceptually appealing framework for understanding learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-27 Vudtiwat Ngampruetikorn , David J. Schwab

The information bottleneck (IB) problem is a widely studied framework in machine learning for extracting compressed features that are informative for downstream tasks. However, current approaches to solving the IB problem rely on a…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Amirmohammad Farzaneh , Osvaldo Simeone

The Information Bottleneck (IB) is a conceptual method for extracting the most compact, yet informative, representation of a set of variables, with respect to the target. It generalizes the notion of minimal sufficient statistics from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-08 Amichai Painsky , Naftali Tishby

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

Decisions of complex language understanding models can be rationalized by limiting their inputs to a relevant subsequence of the original text. A rationale should be as concise as possible without significantly degrading task performance,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-11-04 Bhargavi Paranjape , Mandar Joshi , John Thickstun , Hannaneh Hajishirzi , Luke Zettlemoyer

In classical information theory, the information bottleneck method (IBM) can be regarded as a method of lossy data compression which focusses on preserving meaningful (or relevant) information. As such it has recently gained a lot of…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2020-04-09 Nilanjana Datta , Christoph Hirche , Andreas Winter

Information Bottleneck (IB) is a generalization of rate-distortion theory that naturally incorporates compression and relevance trade-offs for learning. Though the original IB has been extensively studied, there has not been much…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-08 Thanh T. Nguyen , Jaesik Choi

Information bottleneck (IB) and privacy funnel (PF) are two closely related optimization problems which have found applications in machine learning, design of privacy algorithms, capacity problems (e.g., Mrs. Gerber's Lemma), strong data…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2020-12-30 Shahab Asoodeh , Flavio Calmon

The information bottleneck principle is an elegant and useful approach to representation learning. In this paper, we investigate the problem of representation learning in the context of reinforcement learning using the information…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-14 Pei Yingjun , Hou Xinwen

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

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

Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable progress in reasoning capabilities through reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). By leveraging simple rule-based rewards, RL effectively incentivizes LLMs…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Shiye Lei , Zhihao Cheng , Kai Jia , Dacheng Tao

Whenever communication takes place to fulfil a goal, an effective way to encode the source data to be transmitted is to use an encoding rule that allows the receiver to meet the requirements of the goal. A formal way to identify the…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-11-24 Francesco Pezone , Sergio Barbarossa , Paolo Di Lorenzo