Resolving Multi-Modal Regression by Difference-Quotient-Based Clustering:Fast Coarse Conditional-Label Assignment

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25467v1
• Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2026 07:34:23 GMT
• Title: Resolving Multi-Modal Regression by Difference-Quotient-Based Clustering:Fast Coarse Conditional-Label Assignment
• Abstract summary: Difference-Quotient Clustering (DQC) partitions data to minimize intra-cluster output-vs-input discrepancy.<n>We observe two empirical regularities: larger intra-cluster contradictions require deeper networks, and oracle labels generalize from fewer samples than cluster-derived equivalents.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Multimodal regression suffers from the mean-collapse pathology: under squared loss, an unconstrained regressor converges to the conditional mean, which for K > 1 lies away from all modes. We attribute this failure to pairwise contradictions--samples with nearly identical inputs but distant outputs--and propose Difference-Quotient Clustering (DQC), which partitions data to minimize intra-cluster output-vs-input discrepancy. Each sample is assigned to the cluster that minimizes its maximum contradiction ratio; a logits generator and a conditional network are then trained on the resulting labels. Since the generating modality is unknown at test time, we evaluate via minimum squared error (minMSE) against all K true outputs. On synthetic benchmarks (K=5, 10), DQC achieves test minMSE 0.19 (K=5, nx=500), versus 0.09 for an oracle, 1.08 for random labels, and 1.33 for mean collapse. We observe two empirical regularities: larger intra-cluster contradictions require deeper networks, and oracle labels generalize from fewer samples than cluster-derived equivalents. The clustering is a hard, parallelizable O(n^2/2) front-end for coarse conditional assignment, reducing the burden of downstream generative refinement. A second-stage re-clustering on residual errors is outlined as future work.

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