Randomly Initialized Networks Can Learn from Peer-to-Peer Consensus

arXiv:2604.18390v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In self-supervised learning, self-distilled methods have shown impressive performance, learning representations useful for downstream tasks and even displaying emergent properties. However, state-of-the-art methods usually rely on ensembles of complex mechanisms, with many design choices that are empirically motivated and not well understood. In this work, we explore the role of self-distillation within learning dynamics. Specifically, we isolate