[D] Unsupervised Learning — have there been any big advances recently?

Submitted by onebigcat t3_11onol2 in MachineLearning

I feel like unsupervised learning models have always been the less-sexy part of machine learning. There's been some interesting solutions like scBERT and others in the space of single-cell RNAseq, but other than that it seems like clustering, dimensionality reduction, etc, has been mostly the same for years now.

What big stuff has come out, and what's on the radar?

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JustOneAvailableName t1_jbthd11 wrote

Isn't the whole transformer revolution due to SSL which is just plain unsupervised learning?

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onebigcat OP t1_jbtjqc4 wrote

Replying to JustOneAvailableName (#2,208,956)

I guess it’s a matter of how you define unsupervised, but isn’t SSL closer to supervised learning because there’s a ground-truth to compare the prediction to? Whereas if you’re just clustering some high dimensional data, you might not know what the “true” or most accurate way of clustering that information might be, especially in something like genomics where there’s a lot of information that has an unknown purpose.

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