Implicit Contrastive Representation Learning with Guided Stop-gradient

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lee, Byeongchan, Lee, Sehyun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Lee, Byeongchan
Lee, Sehyun
author_facet Lee, Byeongchan
Lee, Sehyun
contents In self-supervised representation learning, Siamese networks are a natural architecture for learning transformation-invariance by bringing representations of positive pairs closer together. But it is prone to collapse into a degenerate solution. To address the issue, in contrastive learning, a contrastive loss is used to prevent collapse by moving representations of negative pairs away from each other. But it is known that algorithms with negative sampling are not robust to a reduction in the number of negative samples. So, on the other hand, there are algorithms that do not use negative pairs. Many positive-only algorithms adopt asymmetric network architecture consisting of source and target encoders as a key factor in coping with collapse. By exploiting the asymmetric architecture, we introduce a methodology to implicitly incorporate the idea of contrastive learning. As its implementation, we present a novel method guided stop-gradient. We apply our method to benchmark algorithms SimSiam and BYOL and show that our method stabilizes training and boosts performance. We also show that the algorithms with our method work well with small batch sizes and do not collapse even when there is no predictor. The code is available at https://github.com/bych-lee/gsg.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_09058
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Implicit Contrastive Representation Learning with Guided Stop-gradient
Lee, Byeongchan
Lee, Sehyun
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
In self-supervised representation learning, Siamese networks are a natural architecture for learning transformation-invariance by bringing representations of positive pairs closer together. But it is prone to collapse into a degenerate solution. To address the issue, in contrastive learning, a contrastive loss is used to prevent collapse by moving representations of negative pairs away from each other. But it is known that algorithms with negative sampling are not robust to a reduction in the number of negative samples. So, on the other hand, there are algorithms that do not use negative pairs. Many positive-only algorithms adopt asymmetric network architecture consisting of source and target encoders as a key factor in coping with collapse. By exploiting the asymmetric architecture, we introduce a methodology to implicitly incorporate the idea of contrastive learning. As its implementation, we present a novel method guided stop-gradient. We apply our method to benchmark algorithms SimSiam and BYOL and show that our method stabilizes training and boosts performance. We also show that the algorithms with our method work well with small batch sizes and do not collapse even when there is no predictor. The code is available at https://github.com/bych-lee/gsg.
title Implicit Contrastive Representation Learning with Guided Stop-gradient
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.09058