Learning quickly from very few labeled samples is a fundamental attribute that separates machines and humans in the era of deep representation learning. Unsupervised few-shot learning (U-FSL) aspires to bridge this gap by discarding the reliance on annotations at training time. Intrigued by the success of contrastive learning approaches in the realm of U-FSL, we structurally approach their shortcomings in both pretraining and downstream inference stages. We propose a novel Dynamic Clustered mEmory (DyCE) module to promote a highly separable latent representation space for enhancing positive sampling at the pretraining phase and infusing implicit class-level insights into unsupervised contrastive learning. We then tackle the, somehow overlooked yet critical, issue of sample bias at the few-shot inference stage. We propose an iterative Optimal Transport-based distribution Alignment (OpTA) strategy and demonstrate that it efficiently addresses the problem, especially in low-shot scenarios where FSL approaches suffer the most from sample bias. We later on discuss that DyCE and OpTA are two intertwined pieces of a novel end-to-end approach (we coin as BECLR), constructively magnifying each other's impact. We then present a suite of extensive quantitative and qualitative experimentation to corroborate that BECLR sets a new state-of-the-art across ALL existing U-FSL benchmarks (to the best of our knowledge), and significantly outperforms the best of the current baselines (codebase available at: https://github.com/stypoumic/BECLR).
Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University（清华大学电子工程系）；Beijing Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Applications（北京数学科学研究院）；Department of Computer Science, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学计算机科学系）；State Key laboratory of Space Network and Communications, Tsinghua University（清华大学空间网络与通信国家重点实验室）
the University of Iowa（爱荷华大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）；Nanjing University（南京大学）
In this paper, we study contrastive learning from an optimization perspective, aiming to analyze and address a fundamental issue of existing contrastive learning methods that either rely on a large batch size or a large dictionary of feature vectors. We consider a global objective for contrastive learning, which contrasts each positive pair with all negative pairs for an anchor point. From the optimization perspective, we explain why existing methods such as SimCLR require a large batch size in order to achieve a satisfactory result. In order to remove such requirement, we propose a memory-eff…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；MEGVII Technology（旷视科技）
Deep neural networks perform poorly on heavily class-imbalanced datasets. Given the promising performance of contrastive learning, we propose Rebalanced Siamese Contrastive Mining (ResCom) to tackle imbalanced recognition. Based on the mathematical analysis and simulation results, we claim that supervised contrastive learning suffers a dual class-imbalance problem at both the original batch and Siamese batch levels, which is more serious than long-tailed classification learning. In this paper, at the original batch level, we introduce a class-balanced supervised contrastive loss to assign adap…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；SmartMore
Unsupervised representation learning with contrastive learning achieved great success. This line of methods duplicate each training batch to construct contrastive pairs, making each training batch and its augmented version forwarded simultaneously and leading to additional computation. We propose a new jigsaw clustering pretext task in this paper, which only needs to forward each training batch itself, and reduces the training cost. Our method makes use of information from both intra- and inter-images, and outperforms previous single-batch based ones by a large margin. It is even comparable to…
Duke University（杜克大学）；Microsoft（微软）；Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工大学）；Amazon（亚马逊）；Fudan University（复旦大学）；KAUST（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）
InfoNCE-based contrastive representation learners, such as SimCLR, have been tremendously successful in recent years. However, these contrastive schemes are notoriously resource demanding, as their effectiveness breaks down with small-batch training (i.e., the log-K curse, whereas K is the batch-size). In this work, we reveal mathematically why contrastive learners fail in the small-batch-size regime, and present a novel simple, non-trivial contrastive objective named FlatNCE, which fixes this issue. Unlike InfoNCE, our FlatNCE no longer explicitly appeals to a discriminative classification go…
Bootstrap Your Own Latent (BYOL) is a self-supervised learning approach for image representation. From an augmented view of an image, BYOL trains an online network to predict a target network representation of a different augmented view of the same image. Unlike contrastive methods, BYOL does not explicitly use a repulsion term built from negative pairs in its training objective. Yet, it avoids collapse to a trivial, constant representation. Thus, it has recently been hypothesized that batch normalization (BN) is critical to prevent collapse in BYOL. Indeed, BN flows gradients across batch ele…
Google Research（谷歌研究院）；Boston University（波士顿大学）；Snap Inc.（森宝公司）；MIT（麻省理工学院）
Contrastive learning applied to self-supervised representation learning has seen a resurgence in recent years, leading to state of the art performance in the unsupervised training of deep image models. Modern batch contrastive approaches subsume or significantly outperform traditional contrastive losses such as triplet, max-margin and the N-pairs loss. In this work, we extend the self-supervised batch contrastive approach to the fully-supervised setting, allowing us to effectively leverage label information. Clusters of points belonging to the same class are pulled together in embedding space,…
Yale University（耶鲁大学）；The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
Contrastive learning (CL) aims to learn useful representation without relying on expert annotations in the context of medical image segmentation. Existing approaches mainly contrast a single positive vector (i.e., an augmentation of the same image) against a set of negatives within the entire remainder of the batch by simply mapping all input features into the same constant vector. Despite the impressive empirical performance, those methods have the following shortcomings: (1) it remains a formidable challenge to prevent the collapsing problems to trivial solutions; and (2) we argue that not a…
The primary goal of knowledge distillation (KD) is to encapsulate the information of a model learned from a teacher network into a student network, with the latter being more compact than the former. Existing work, e.g., using Kullback-Leibler divergence for distillation, may fail to capture important structural knowledge in the teacher network and often lacks the ability for feature generalization, particularly in situations when teacher and student are built to address different classification tasks. We propose Wasserstein Contrastive Representation Distillation (WCoRD), which leverages both…
Dynamic Residual Encoding with Slide-Level Contrastive Learning for End-to-End Whole Slide Image Representation
School of Computer Science and Enginecring, Central South University（计算机科学与工程学院，中南大学）；School of Computer Science（计算机科学学院）；Enginecring, Central South University（工程学院，中南大学）
Facebook AI Research (FAIR)（Facebook人工智能研究院(FAIR)）
Contrastive unsupervised learning has recently shown encouraging progress, e.g., in Momentum Contrast (MoCo) and SimCLR. In this note, we verify the effectiveness of two of SimCLR's design improvements by implementing them in the MoCo framework. With simple modifications to MoCo---namely, using an MLP projection head and more data augmentation---we establish stronger baselines that outperform SimCLR and do not require large training batches. We hope this will make state-of-the-art unsupervised learning research more accessible. Code will be made public.
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）
Due to the memorization effect in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), training with noisy labels usually results in inferior model performance. Existing state-of-the-art methods primarily adopt a sample selection strategy, which selects small-loss samples for subsequent training. However, prior literature tends to perform sample selection within each mini-batch, neglecting the imbalance of noise ratios in different mini-batches. Moreover, valuable knowledge within high-loss samples is wasted. To this end, we propose a noise-robust approach named Jo-SRC (Joint Sample Selection and Model Regularization…
Proposal-Contrastive Pretraining for Object Detection from Fewer Data
Université Paris-Saclay（巴黎-萨克雷大学）；CEA（法国原子能委员会）；Université Jean Monnet Saint-Etienne（圣艾蒂安让·莫内大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Laboratoire Hubert Curien UMR 5516（于贝尔·居里安实验室）；Institut Universitaire de France (IUF)（法国大学研究院）
Self-supervised representation learning is an emerging research topic for its powerful capacity in learning with unlabeled data. As a mainstream self-supervised learning method, augmentation-based contrastive learning has achieved great success in various computer vision tasks that lack manual annotations. Despite current progress, the existing methods are often limited by extra cost on memory or storage, and their performance still has large room for improvement. Here we present a self-supervised representation learning method, namely AAG, which is featured by an auxiliary augmentation strate…
Contrastive learning is commonly applied to self-supervised learning, and has been shown to outperform traditional approaches such as the triplet loss and N-pair loss. However, the requirement of large batch sizes and memory banks has made it difficult and slow to train. Recently, Supervised Contrasative approaches have been developed to overcome these problems. They focus more on learning a good representation for each class individually, or between a cluster of classes. In this work we attempt to rank classes based on similarity using a user-defined ranking, to learn an efficient representat…
This paper presents SimCLR: a simple framework for contrastive learning of visual representations. We simplify recently proposed contrastive self-supervised learning algorithms without requiring specialized architectures or a memory bank. In order to understand what enables the contrastive prediction tasks to learn useful representations, we systematically study the major components of our framework. We show that (1) composition of data augmentations plays a critical role in defining effective predictive tasks, (2) introducing a learnable nonlinear transformation between the representation and…
University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；MIT CSAIL（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
We introduce CAN, a simple, efficient and scalable method for self-supervised learning of visual representations. Our framework is a minimal and conceptually clean synthesis of (C) contrastive learning, (A) masked autoencoders, and (N) the noise prediction approach used in diffusion models. The learning mechanisms are complementary to one another: contrastive learning shapes the embedding space across a batch of image samples; masked autoencoders focus on reconstruction of the low-frequency spatial correlations in a single image sample; and noise prediction encourages the reconstruction of the…
Fudan University（复旦大学）；Shanghai Collaborative Innovation Center on Intelligent Visual Computing（上海智能视觉计算协同创新中心）；La Trobe University（乐卓博大学）
Real-world data typically follow a long-tailed distribution, where a few majority categories occupy most of the data while most minority categories contain a limited number of samples. Classification models minimizing cross-entropy struggle to represent and classify the tail classes. Although the problem of learning unbiased classifiers has been well studied, methods for representing imbalanced data are under-explored. In this paper, we focus on representation learning for imbalanced data. Recently, supervised contrastive learning has shown promising performance on balanced data recently. Howe…
Contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP) serves as a de-facto standard to align images and texts. Nonetheless, the loose correlation between images and texts of web-crawled data renders the contrastive objective data inefficient and craving for a large training batch size. In this work, we explore the validity of non-contrastive language-image pre-training (nCLIP), and study whether nice properties exhibited in visual self-supervised models can emerge. We empirically observe that the non-contrastive objective nourishes representation learning while sufficiently underperforming under zero…
MEGVII Technology（旷视科技）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
In this paper, we propose EqCo (Equivalent Rules for Contrastive Learning) to make self-supervised learning irrelevant to the number of negative samples in the contrastive learning framework. Inspired by the InfoMax principle, we point that the margin term in contrastive loss needs to be adaptively scaled according to the number of negative pairs in order to keep steady mutual information bound and gradient magnitude. EqCo bridges the performance gap among a wide range of negative sample sizes, so that for the first time, we can use only a few negative pairs (e.g., 16 per query) to perform sel…
The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；JD Explore Academy（京东探索研究院）
Despite the success of deep neural networks, there are still many challenges in deep representation learning due to the data scarcity issues such as data imbalance, unseen distribution, and domain shift. To address the above-mentioned issues, a variety of methods have been devised to explore the sample relationships in a vanilla way (i.e., from the perspectives of either the input or the loss function), failing to explore the internal structure of deep neural networks for learning with sample relationships. Inspired by this, we propose to enable deep neural networks themselves with the ability…
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…
Contrastive self-supervised learning (CSL) with a prototypical regularization has been introduced in learning meaningful representations for downstream tasks that require strong semantic information. However, to optimize CSL with a loss that performs the prototypical regularization aggressively, e.g., the ProtoNCE loss, might cause the "coagulation" of examples in the embedding space. That is, the intra-prototype diversity of samples collapses to trivial solutions for their prototype being well-separated from others. Motivated by previous works, we propose to mitigate this phenomenon by learni…
We present a new self-supervised pre-training of Vision Transformers for dense prediction tasks. It is based on a contrastive loss across views that compares pixel-level representations to global image representations. This strategy produces better local features suitable for dense prediction tasks as opposed to contrastive pre-training based on global image representation only. Furthermore, our approach does not suffer from a reduced batch size since the number of negative examples needed in the contrastive loss is in the order of the number of local features. We demonstrate the effectiveness…
Graph clustering discovers groups or communities within networks. Deep learning methods such as autoencoders (AE) extract effective clustering and downstream representations but cannot incorporate rich structural information. While Graph Neural Networks (GNN) have shown great success in encoding graph structure, typical GNNs based on convolution or attention variants suffer from over-smoothing, noise, heterophily, are computationally expensive and typically require the complete graph being present. Instead, we propose Self-Supervised Contrastive Graph Clustering (SCGC), which imposes graph-str…
Generalized Zero-Shot Learning (GZSL) aims to recognize both seen and unseen classes by training only the seen classes, in which the instances of unseen classes tend to be biased towards the seen class. In this paper, we propose a Cluster-based Contrastive Disentangling (CCD) method to improve GZSL by alleviating the semantic gap and domain shift problems. Specifically, we first cluster the batch data to form several sets containing similar classes. Then, we disentangle the visual features into semantic-unspecific and semantic-matched variables, and further disentangle the semantic-matched var…
School of Electronic Engineering, Xidian University（西安电子科技大学电子工程学院）；University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）；JD Finance America Corporation（京东金融美国公司）
Deep clustering successfully provides more effective features than conventional ones and thus becomes an important technique in current unsupervised learning. However, most deep clustering methods ignore the vital positive and negative pairs introduced by data augmentation and further the significance of contrastive learning, which leads to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we present a novel Doubly Contrastive Deep Clustering (DCDC) framework, which constructs contrastive loss over both sample and class views to obtain more discriminative features and competitive results. Specifically, f…
In this work, we have worked towards two major goals. Firstly, we have investigated the importance of Batch Normalisation (BN) layers in a non-contrastive representation learning framework called Bootstrap Your Own Latent (BYOL). We conducted several experiments to conclude that BN layers are not necessary for representation learning in BYOL. Moreover, BYOL only learns from the positive pairs of images but ignores other semantically similar images in the same input batch. For the second goal, we have introduced two new loss functions to determine the semantically similar pairs in the same inpu…
In the realms of computer vision, it is evident that deep neural networks perform better in a supervised setting with a large amount of labeled data. The representations learned with supervision are not only of high quality but also helps the model in enhancing its accuracy. However, the collection and annotation of a large dataset are costly and time-consuming. To avoid the same, there has been a lot of research going on in the field of unsupervised visual representation learning especially in a self-supervised setting. Amongst the recent advancements in self-supervised methods for visual rec…
Repulsor: Accelerating Generative Modeling with a Contrastive Memory Bank
School of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, University of Science and Technology of China（人工智能与数据科学学院，中国科学技术大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；HKU（香港大学）；CUHK（香港大学）；Fudan University（复旦大学）；Nanjing University（南京大学）
Jilin University（吉林大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Zhejiang Lab（之江实验室）；Engineering Research Center of Knowledge-Driven Human-Machine Intelligence, MOE（教育部知识驱动人机智能工程研究中心）
Multifold observations are common for different data modalities, e.g., a 3D shape can be represented by multi-view images and an image can be described with different captions. Existing cross-modal contrastive representation learning (XM-CLR) methods such as CLIP are not fully suitable for multifold data as they only consider one positive pair and treat other pairs as negative when computing the contrastive loss. In this paper, we propose MXM-CLR, a unified framework for contrastive learning of multifold cross-modal representations. MXM-CLR explicitly models and learns the relationships betwee…
Subtle periodic signals such as blood volume pulse and respiration can be extracted from RGB video, enabling remote health monitoring at low cost. Advancements in remote pulse estimation -- or remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) -- are currently driven by deep learning solutions. However, modern approaches are trained and evaluated on benchmark datasets with associated ground truth from contact-PPG sensors. We present the first non-contrastive unsupervised learning framework for signal regression to break free from the constraints of labelled video data. With minimal assumptions of periodicity …
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；University of Illinois（伊利诺伊大学）；YanShan University（燕山大学）；ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）
Image-to-image translation is a fundamental task in computer vision. It transforms images from one domain to images in another domain so that they have particular domain-specific characteristics. Most prior works train a generative model to learn the mapping from a source domain to a target domain. However, learning such mapping between domains is challenging because data from different domains can be highly unbalanced in terms of both quality and quantity. To address this problem, we propose a new approach to extract image features by learning the similarities and differences of samples withi…
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…
