In contrastive learning, the choice of ``view'' controls the information that the representation captures and influences the performance of the model. However, leading graph contrastive learning methods generally produce views via random corruption or learning, which could lead to the loss of essential information and alteration of semantic information. An anchor view that maintains the essential information of input graphs for contrastive learning has been hardly investigated. In this paper, based on the theory of graph information bottleneck, we deduce the definition of this anchor view; put differently, \textit{the anchor view with essential information of input graph is supposed to have the minimal structural uncertainty}. Furthermore, guided by structural entropy, we implement the anchor view, termed \textbf{SEGA}, for graph contrastive learning. We extensively validate the proposed anchor view on various benchmarks regarding graph classification under unsupervised, semi-supervised, and transfer learning and achieve significant performance boosts compared to the state-of-the-art methods.
ZAYAN: Disentangled Contrastive Transformer for Tabular Remote Sensing Data
Lane Dept. of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering（兰恩计算机科学与电气工程系）；Dept. of Geology & Geography（地质与地理系）；West Virginia University（西弗吉尼亚大学）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering（计算机科学与工程系）；Green University of Bangladesh（孟加拉国绿色大学）；Stamford University Bangladesh（班加罗尔斯坦福大学）
Department of EECS, MIT（麻省理工学院电子工程与计算机科学系）；Department of Computer Science, University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学计算机科学系）
The InfoNCE objective, originally introduced for contrastive representation learning, has become a popular choice for mutual information (MI) estimation, despite its indirect connection to MI. In this paper, we demonstrate why InfoNCE should not be regarded as a valid MI estimator, and we introduce a simple modification, which we refer to as InfoNCE-anchor, for accurate MI estimation. Our modification introduces an auxiliary anchor class, enabling consistent density ratio estimation and yielding a plug-in MI estimator with significantly reduced bias. Beyond this, we generalize our framework us…
KAIST（韩国科学技术院）；Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；University of North Texas（北德克萨斯大学）
Contrastive learning (CL) is widely known to require many negative samples, 65536 in MoCo for instance, for which the performance of a dictionary-free framework is often inferior because the negative sample size (NSS) is limited by its mini-batch size (MBS). To decouple the NSS from the MBS, a dynamic dictionary has been adopted in a large volume of CL frameworks, among which arguably the most popular one is MoCo family. In essence, MoCo adopts a momentum-based queue dictionary, for which we perform a fine-grained analysis of its size and consistency. We point out that InfoNCE loss used in MoC…
Westlake University（西湖大学）；Westlake Institute for Advanced Study（西湖高等研究院）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
Contrastive Learning (CL) has emerged as a dominant technique for unsupervised representation learning which embeds augmented versions of the anchor close to each other (positive samples) and pushes the embeddings of other samples (negatives) apart. As revealed in recent studies, CL can benefit from hard negatives (negatives that are most similar to the anchor). However, we observe limited benefits when we adopt existing hard negative mining techniques of other domains in Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL). We perform both experimental and theoretical analysis on this phenomenon and find it can …
One of the challenges in contrastive learning is the selection of appropriate \textit{hard negative} examples, in the absence of label information. Random sampling or importance sampling methods based on feature similarity often lead to sub-optimal performance. In this work, we introduce UnReMix, a hard negative sampling strategy that takes into account anchor similarity, model uncertainty and representativeness. Experimental results on several benchmarks show that UnReMix improves negative sample selection, and subsequently downstream performance when compared to state-of-the-art contrastive …
SupReMix: Supervised Contrastive Learning for Medical Imaging Regression with Mixup
Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore（杨潞龄医学院，新加坡国立大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Duke University（杜克大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）
Siamese neural network is a very powerful architecture for both feature extraction and metric learning. It usually consists of several networks that share weights. The Siamese concept is topology-agnostic and can use any neural network as its backbone. The two most popular loss functions for training these networks are the triplet and contrastive loss functions. In this paper, we propose two novel loss functions, named Fisher Discriminant Triplet (FDT) and Fisher Discriminant Contrastive (FDC). The former uses anchor-neighbor-distant triplets while the latter utilizes pairs of anchor-neighbor …
Contrastive and Adaptive Multi-modal Masked Autoencoder for Spatial Transcriptomics
Department of Artificial Intelligence, Yonsei University（延世大学人工智能系）；Department of Computer Science, Yonsei University（延世大学计算机科学系）；Yonsei University College of Medicine（延世大学医学院）
National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；Southeast University（东南大学）；Purple Mountain Laboratories（紫金山实验室）
Similarity metric is crucial for massive MIMO positioning utilizing channel state information~(CSI). In this letter, we propose a novel massive MIMO CSI similarity learning method via deep convolutional neural network~(DCNN) and contrastive learning. A contrastive loss function is designed considering multiple positive and negative CSI samples drawn from a training dataset. The DCNN encoder is trained using the loss so that positive samples are mapped to points close to the anchor's encoding, while encodings of negative samples are kept away from the anchor's in the representation space. Evalu…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
Leading graph contrastive learning (GCL) methods perform graph augmentations in two fashions: (1) randomly corrupting the anchor graph, which could cause the loss of semantic information, or (2) using domain knowledge to maintain salient features, which undermines the generalization to other domains. Taking an invariance look at GCL, we argue that a high-performing augmentation should preserve the salient semantics of anchor graphs regarding instance-discrimination. To this end, we relate GCL with invariant rationale discovery, and propose a new framework, Rationale-aware Graph Contrastive Lea…
Learning Robust Representations for Malicious Content Detection via Contrastive Sampling and Uncertainty Estimation
1 College of Engineering；Computer Science, University of Central Florida, Orlando, USA, 2 Department of Computer Science \& Engineering, Mississippi State University, MS State, USA , 3 Department of Computer Science, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA
DSIG - Bayer Pharmaceuticals（拜耳制药 DSIG）；New York University（纽约大学）；Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学）
While contrastive learning is proven to be an effective training strategy in computer vision, Natural Language Processing (NLP) is only recently adopting it as a self-supervised alternative to Masked Language Modeling (MLM) for improving sequence representations. This paper introduces SupCL-Seq, which extends the supervised contrastive learning from computer vision to the optimization of sequence representations in NLP. By altering the dropout mask probability in standard Transformer architectures, for every representation (anchor), we generate augmented altered views. A supervised contrastive…
In contrastive learning in the image domain, the anchor and positive samples are forced to have as close representations as possible. However, forcing the two samples to have the same representation could be misleading because the data augmentation techniques make the two samples different. In this paper, we introduce a new representation, partitioned representation, which can learn both common and unique features of the anchor and positive samples in contrastive learning. The partitioned representation consists of two parts: the content part and the style part. The content part represents com…
Considering the abundance of unlabeled speech data and the high labeling costs, unsupervised learning methods can be essential for better system development. One of the most successful methods is contrastive self-supervised methods, which require negative sampling: sampling alternative samples to contrast with the current sample (anchor). However, it is hard to ensure if all the negative samples belong to classes different from the anchor class without labels. This paper applies a non-contrastive self-supervised learning method on an unlabeled speech corpus to learn utterance-level embeddings.…
In recent studies, self-supervised pre-trained models tend to outperform supervised pre-trained models in transfer learning. In particular, self-supervised learning (SSL) of utterance-level speech representation can be used in speech applications that require discriminative representation of consistent attributes within an utterance: speaker, language, emotion, and age. Existing frame-level self-supervised speech representation, e.g., wav2vec, can be used as utterance-level representation with pooling, but the models are usually large. There are also SSL techniques to learn utterance-level rep…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）；Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Tencent Inc.（腾讯公司）
The recent emergence of contrastive learning approaches facilitates the application on graph representation learning (GRL), introducing graph contrastive learning (GCL) into the literature. These methods contrast semantically similar and dissimilar sample pairs to encode the semantics into node or graph embeddings. However, most existing works only performed \textbf{model-level} evaluation, and did not explore the combination space of modules for more comprehensive and systematic studies. For effective \textbf{module-level} evaluation, we propose a framework that decomposes GCL models into fou…
As a representative self-supervised method, contrastive learning has achieved great successes in unsupervised training of representations. It trains an encoder by distinguishing positive samples from negative ones given query anchors. These positive and negative samples play critical roles in defining the objective to learn the discriminative encoder, avoiding it from learning trivial features. While existing methods heuristically choose these samples, we present a principled method where both positive and negative samples are directly learnable end-to-end with the encoder. We show that the po…
Monash University（莫纳什大学）；Defence Science and Technology Group, Australia（澳大利亚国防科技集团）；CSIRO Data61, Australia（澳大利亚联邦科学与工业研究组织Data61）
Contrastive learning (CL) has recently emerged as an effective approach to learning representation in a range of downstream tasks. Central to this approach is the selection of positive (similar) and negative (dissimilar) sets to provide the model the opportunity to `contrast' between data and class representation in the latent space. In this paper, we investigate CL for improving model robustness using adversarial samples. We first designed and performed a comprehensive study to understand how adversarial vulnerability behaves in the latent space. Based on this empirical evidence, we propose a…
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved great success in learning graph representations and thus facilitating various graph-related tasks. However, most GNN methods adopt a supervised learning setting, which is not always feasible in real-world applications due to the difficulty to obtain labeled data. Hence, graph self-supervised learning has been attracting increasing attention. Graph contrastive learning (GCL) is a representative framework for self-supervised learning. In general, GCL learns node representations by contrasting semantically similar nodes (positive samples) and dissimilar …
Affinity Uncertainty-based Hard Negative Mining in Graph Contrastive Learning
Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute, University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学澳大利亚人工智能研究院）；School of Computing and Information Systems, Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学计算与信息系统学院）
Contrastive Self-supervised Learning (CSL) is a practical solution that learns meaningful visual representations from massive data in an unsupervised approach. The ordinary CSL embeds the features extracted from neural networks onto specific topological structures. During the training progress, the contrastive loss draws the different views of the same input together while pushing the embeddings from different inputs apart. One of the drawbacks of CSL is that the loss term requires a large number of negative samples to provide better mutual information bound ideally. However, increasing the nu…
How can you sample good negative examples for contrastive learning? We argue that, as with metric learning, contrastive learning of representations benefits from hard negative samples (i.e., points that are difficult to distinguish from an anchor point). The key challenge toward using hard negatives is that contrastive methods must remain unsupervised, making it infeasible to adopt existing negative sampling strategies that use true similarity information. In response, we develop a new family of unsupervised sampling methods for selecting hard negative samples where the user can control the ha…
Contrastive learning has demonstrated promising performance in image and text domains either in a self-supervised or a supervised manner. In this work, we extend the supervised contrastive learning framework to clinical risk prediction problems based on longitudinal electronic health records (EHR). We propose a general supervised contrastive loss $\mathcal{L}_{\text{Contrastive Cross Entropy} } + λ\mathcal{L}_{\text{Supervised Contrastive Regularizer}}$ for learning both binary classification (e.g. in-hospital mortality prediction) and multi-label classification (e.g. phenotyping) in a unified…
Jiangsu University（江苏大学）；Jiangsu Engineering Research Center of Big Data Ubiquitous Perception and Intelligent Agriculture Applications（江苏省大数据泛在感知与智慧农业应用工程研究中心）；MIIT Key Laboratory of Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence（工信部模式分析与机器智能重点实验室）；Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）
Contrastive learning (CL) has shown impressive advances in image representation learning in whichever supervised multi-class classification or unsupervised learning. However, these CL methods fail to be directly adapted to multi-label image classification due to the difficulty in defining the positive and negative instances to contrast a given anchor image in multi-label scenario, let the label missing one alone, implying that borrowing a commonly-used way from contrastive multi-class learning to define them will incur a lot of false negative instances unfavorable for learning. In this paper, …
AdNGCL: Adaptive Negative Scheduling for Graph Contrastive Learning
Jinan University（暨南大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Hainan University（海南大学）；Manchester Metropolitan University（曼彻斯特城市大学）；King Abdulaziz University（阿卜杜勒阿齐兹国王大学）
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to transfer knowledge learned from a fully-labeled source domain to a different unlabeled target domain. Most existing UDA methods learn domain-invariant feature representations by minimizing feature distances across domains. In this work, we build upon contrastive self-supervised learning to align features so as to reduce the domain discrepancy between training and testing sets. Exploring the same set of categories shared by both domains, we introduce a simple yet effective framework CDCL, for domain alignment. In particular, given an anchor image fro…
Contrastive self-supervised learning (CSL) is an approach to learn useful representations by solving a pretext task that selects and compares anchor, negative and positive (APN) features from an unlabeled dataset. We present a conceptual framework that characterizes CSL approaches in five aspects (1) data augmentation pipeline, (2) encoder selection, (3) representation extraction, (4) similarity measure, and (5) loss function. We analyze three leading CSL approaches--AMDIM, CPC, and SimCLR--, and show that despite different motivations, they are special cases under this framework. We show the …
Unsupervised disentangled representation learning is a long-standing problem in computer vision. This work proposes a novel framework for performing image clustering from deep embeddings by combining instance-level contrastive learning with a deep embedding based cluster center predictor. Our approach jointly learns representations and predicts cluster centers in an end-to-end manner. This is accomplished via a three-pronged approach that combines a clustering loss, an instance-wise contrastive loss, and an anchor loss. Our fundamental intuition is that using an ensemble loss that incorporates…
Disentangle-then-Refine: LLM-Guided Decoupling and Structure-Aware Refinement for Graph Contrastive Learning
Institute of Physical Science and Information Technology（物理科学与信息技术研究院）；School of Mathematical Sciences（数学科学学院）；Qinghai Institute of Science and Technology Information（青海科学技术信息研究院）
Cadence Design Systems (India) Private Limited（楷登电子科技（印度）私人有限公司）；Indian Institute of Technology, Jodhpur（焦特布尔印度理工学院）
Contrastive learning is a powerful technique to learn representations that are semantically distinctive and geometrically invariant. While most of the earlier approaches have demonstrated its effectiveness on single-modality learning tasks such as image classification, recently there have been a few attempts towards extending this idea to multi-modal data. In this paper, we propose two loss functions based on normalized cross-entropy to perform the task of learning joint visual-semantic embedding using batch contrastive training. In a batch, for a given anchor point from one modality, we consi…
