Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Jiang, Ruijie, Nguyen, Thuan, Ishwar, Prakash, Aeron, Shuchin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2022
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.00078
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911871876988928
author Jiang, Ruijie
Nguyen, Thuan
Ishwar, Prakash
Aeron, Shuchin
author_facet Jiang, Ruijie
Nguyen, Thuan
Ishwar, Prakash
Aeron, Shuchin
contents Through minimization of an appropriate loss function such as the InfoNCE loss, contrastive learning (CL) learns a useful representation function by pulling positive samples close to each other while pushing negative samples far apart in the embedding space. The positive samples are typically created using "label-preserving" augmentations, i.e., domain-specific transformations of a given datum or anchor. In absence of class information, in unsupervised CL (UCL), the negative samples are typically chosen randomly and independently of the anchor from a preset negative sampling distribution over the entire dataset. This leads to class-collisions in UCL. Supervised CL (SCL), avoids this class collision by conditioning the negative sampling distribution to samples having labels different from that of the anchor. In hard-UCL (H-UCL), which has been shown to be an effective method to further enhance UCL, the negative sampling distribution is conditionally tilted, by means of a hardening function, towards samples that are closer to the anchor. Motivated by this, in this paper we propose hard-SCL (H-SCL) {wherein} the class conditional negative sampling distribution {is tilted} via a hardening function. Our simulation results confirm the utility of H-SCL over SCL with significant performance gains {in downstream classification tasks.} Analytically, we show that {in the} limit of infinite negative samples per anchor and a suitable assumption, the {H-SCL loss} is upper bounded by the {H-UCL loss}, thereby justifying the utility of H-UCL {for controlling} the H-SCL loss in the absence of label information. Through experiments on several datasets, we verify the assumption as well as the claimed inequality between H-UCL and H-SCL losses. We also provide a plausible scenario where H-SCL loss is lower bounded by UCL loss, indicating the limited utility of UCL in controlling the H-SCL loss.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2209_00078
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Supervised Contrastive Learning with Hard Negative Samples
Jiang, Ruijie
Nguyen, Thuan
Ishwar, Prakash
Aeron, Shuchin
Machine Learning
Through minimization of an appropriate loss function such as the InfoNCE loss, contrastive learning (CL) learns a useful representation function by pulling positive samples close to each other while pushing negative samples far apart in the embedding space. The positive samples are typically created using "label-preserving" augmentations, i.e., domain-specific transformations of a given datum or anchor. In absence of class information, in unsupervised CL (UCL), the negative samples are typically chosen randomly and independently of the anchor from a preset negative sampling distribution over the entire dataset. This leads to class-collisions in UCL. Supervised CL (SCL), avoids this class collision by conditioning the negative sampling distribution to samples having labels different from that of the anchor. In hard-UCL (H-UCL), which has been shown to be an effective method to further enhance UCL, the negative sampling distribution is conditionally tilted, by means of a hardening function, towards samples that are closer to the anchor. Motivated by this, in this paper we propose hard-SCL (H-SCL) {wherein} the class conditional negative sampling distribution {is tilted} via a hardening function. Our simulation results confirm the utility of H-SCL over SCL with significant performance gains {in downstream classification tasks.} Analytically, we show that {in the} limit of infinite negative samples per anchor and a suitable assumption, the {H-SCL loss} is upper bounded by the {H-UCL loss}, thereby justifying the utility of H-UCL {for controlling} the H-SCL loss in the absence of label information. Through experiments on several datasets, we verify the assumption as well as the claimed inequality between H-UCL and H-SCL losses. We also provide a plausible scenario where H-SCL loss is lower bounded by UCL loss, indicating the limited utility of UCL in controlling the H-SCL loss.
title Supervised Contrastive Learning with Hard Negative Samples
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.00078