5 papers
An Identifiability Theory of Masked Prediction: Mode Blindness and Mask Schedules
Yichao Cai, Javen Qinfeng Shi
Masked prediction learns by inferring missing variables from visible context. When does optimizing this conditional task recover the true joint data distribution? We study this que…
Boundary Embedding Shaping with Adaptive Contrastive Learning for Graph Structural Disentanglement
Jiaqing Chen, Zidu Yin, Yichao Cai +4
Graph neural networks (GNNs) excel at aggregating neighbor information for classification, yet their performance is hindered by graph structural entanglement, where spurious correl…
What Makes a Representation Good for Single-Cell Perturbation Prediction?
Wenkang Jiang, Yuhang Liu, Yichao Cai +5
Single-cell perturbation modeling is fundamental for understanding and predicting cellular responses to genetic perturbations. However, existing approaches, from causal representat…
The Geometric Mechanics of Contrastive Representation Learning: Alignment Potentials, Entropic Dispersion, and Cross-modal Divergence
Yichao Cai, Zhen Zhang, Yuhang Liu +1
While InfoNCE underlies modern contrastive learning, its geometric mechanisms remain under-characterized beyond the canonical alignment--uniformity decomposition. We develop a meas…
On the Value of Cross-Modal Misalignment in Multimodal Representation Learning
Yichao Cai, Yuhang Liu, Erdun Gao +4
Multimodal representation learning, exemplified by multimodal contrastive learning (MMCL) using image-text pairs, aims to learn powerful representations by aligning cues across mod…