VICReg / Barlow Twins — non-contrastive SSL via covariance regularization.
hardAnswer
- Barlow Twins: cross-correlation of two augmented view embeddings should be identity (diagonal = 1, off-diag = 0 → invariance + de-correlation).
- VICReg extends with three terms: invariance (MSE between views), variance (each dim has SD > threshold), covariance (off-diag = 0).
- No negatives, no momentum encoder — just clean regularization.
- Elegant, competitive with contrastive methods.
Check yourself — multiple choice
- Same as SimCLR
- Cross-correlation of augmented views = identity (invariance + de-correlation); VICReg adds explicit variance + covariance terms; no negatives / no momentum needed
- Random
- Not real
Barlow / VICReg: invariance + variance + covariance regularization; no negatives.
#representation-learning
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