Hypersolid: Emergent Vision Representations via Short-Range Repulsion

Abstract:A central problem in self-supervised learning is preventing representation collapse. Most methods avoid it through global mechanisms, such as contrastive expansion, variance constraints, decorrelating dimensions, or enforcing certain output distributions. In this work, we study a different design: short-range repulsion. We introduce Hypersolid, a self-supervised objective that combines view alignment with local collision avoidance. Our method induces a latent geometry of compact, semantically aligned neighborhoods with low anisotropy. This geometry is especially effective for unsupervised clustering and fine-grained separation, although it comes at the cost of weaker transferability.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2601.21255 [cs.CV]

(or arXiv:2601.21255v2 [cs.CV] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2601.21255 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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