Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Feeney, Patrick, Hughes, Michael C.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.14277
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915009018200064
author Feeney, Patrick
Hughes, Michael C.
author_facet Feeney, Patrick
Hughes, Michael C.
contents The information noise-contrastive estimation (InfoNCE) loss function provides the basis of many self-supervised deep learning methods due to its strong empirical results and theoretic motivation. Previous work suggests a supervised contrastive (SupCon) loss to extend InfoNCE to learn from available class labels. This SupCon loss has been widely-used due to reports of good empirical performance. However, in this work we find that the prior SupCon loss formulation has questionable justification because it can encourage some images from the same class to repel one another in the learned embedding space. This problematic intra-class repulsion gets worse as the number of images sharing one class label increases. We propose the Supervised InfoNCE REvisited (SINCERE) loss as a theoretically-justified supervised extension of InfoNCE that eliminates intra-class repulsion. Experiments show that SINCERE leads to better separation of embeddings from different classes and improves transfer learning classification accuracy. We additionally utilize probabilistic modeling to derive an information-theoretic bound that relates SINCERE loss to the symmeterized KL divergence between data-generating distributions for a target class and all other classes.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2309_14277
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SINCERE: Supervised Information Noise-Contrastive Estimation REvisited
Feeney, Patrick
Hughes, Michael C.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
The information noise-contrastive estimation (InfoNCE) loss function provides the basis of many self-supervised deep learning methods due to its strong empirical results and theoretic motivation. Previous work suggests a supervised contrastive (SupCon) loss to extend InfoNCE to learn from available class labels. This SupCon loss has been widely-used due to reports of good empirical performance. However, in this work we find that the prior SupCon loss formulation has questionable justification because it can encourage some images from the same class to repel one another in the learned embedding space. This problematic intra-class repulsion gets worse as the number of images sharing one class label increases. We propose the Supervised InfoNCE REvisited (SINCERE) loss as a theoretically-justified supervised extension of InfoNCE that eliminates intra-class repulsion. Experiments show that SINCERE leads to better separation of embeddings from different classes and improves transfer learning classification accuracy. We additionally utilize probabilistic modeling to derive an information-theoretic bound that relates SINCERE loss to the symmeterized KL divergence between data-generating distributions for a target class and all other classes.
title SINCERE: Supervised Information Noise-Contrastive Estimation REvisited
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.14277