Rethinking Multi-view Representation Learning via Distilled Disentangling

Multi-view representation learning aims to derive robust representations that are both view-consistent and view-specific from diverse data sources. This paper presents an in-depth analysis of existing approaches in this domain highlighting a commonly overlooked aspect: the redundancy between view-consistent and view-specific representations. To this end we propose an innovative framework for multi-view representation learning which incorporates a technique we term 'distilled disentangling'. Our method introduces the concept of masked cross-view prediction enabling the extraction of compact high-quality view-consistent representations from various sources without incurring extra computational overhead. Additionally we develop a distilled disentangling module that efficiently filters out consistency-related information from multi-view representations resulting in purer view-specific representations. This approach significantly reduces redundancy between view-consistent and view-specific representations enhancing the overall efficiency of the learning process. Our empirical evaluations reveal that higher mask ratios substantially improve the quality of view-consistent representations. Moreover we find that reducing the dimensionality of view-consistent representations relative to that of view-specific representations further refines the quality of the combined representations.