# Modulate Your Spectrum in Self-Supervised Learning Source: [Modulate Your Spectrum in Self-Supervised Learning]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-27T06:29:09.263Z Authors: Xi Weng, Yunhao Ni, Tengwei Song, Jie Luo, Rao Muhammad Anwer, Salman Khan, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Lei Huang Published: 2023-05-26T09:59:48.000Z ## Abstract Whitening loss offers a theoretical guarantee against feature collapse in self-supervised learning (SSL) with joint embedding architectures. Typically, it involves a hard whitening approach, transforming the embedding and applying loss to the whitened output. In this work, we introduce Spectral Transformation (ST), a framework to modulate the spectrum of embedding and to seek for functions beyond whitening that can avoid dimensional collapse. We show that whitening is a special instance of ST by definition, and our empirical investigations unveil other ST instances capable of preventing collapse. Additionally, we propose a novel ST instance named IterNorm with trace loss (INTL). Theoretical analysis confirms INTL's efficacy in preventing collapse and modulating the spectrum of embedding toward equal-eigenvalues during optimization. Our experiments on ImageNet classification and COCO object detection demonstrate INTL's potential in learning superior representations. The code is available at https://github.com/winci-ai/INTL. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()