We argue that a form of the valuable information provided by the auxiliary information is its implied data clustering information. For instance, considering hashtags as auxiliary information, we can hypothesize that an Instagram image will be semantically more similar with the same hashtags. With this intuition, we present a two-stage weakly-supervised contrastive learning approach. The first stage is to cluster data according to its auxiliary information. The second stage is to learn similar representations within the same cluster and dissimilar representations for data from different clusters. Our empirical experiments suggest the following three contributions. First, compared to conventional self-supervised representations, the auxiliary-information-infused representations bring the performance closer to the supervised representations, which use direct downstream labels as supervision signals. Second, our approach performs the best in most cases, when comparing our approach with other baseline representation learning methods that also leverage auxiliary data information. Third, we show that our approach also works well with unsupervised constructed clusters (e.g., no auxiliary information), resulting in a strong unsupervised representation learning approach.
Self-supervised learning has proved to be a powerful approach to learn image representations without the need of large labeled datasets. For underwater robotics, it is of great interest to design computer vision algorithms to improve perception capabilities such as sonar image classification. Due to the confidential nature of sonar imaging and the difficulty to interpret sonar images, it is challenging to create public large labeled sonar datasets to train supervised learning algorithms. In this work, we investigate the potential of three self-supervised learning methods (RotNet, Denoising Autoencoders, and Jigsaw) to learn high-quality sonar image representation without the need of human labels. We present pre-training and transfer learning results on real-life sonar image datasets. Our results indicate that self-supervised pre-training yields classification performance comparable to supervised pre-training in a few-shot transfer learning setup across all three methods. Code and self-supervised pre-trained models are be available at //github.com/agrija9/ssl-sonar-images
Contrastive learning has led to substantial improvements in the quality of learned embedding representations for tasks such as image classification. However, a key drawback of existing contrastive augmentation methods is that they may lead to the modification of the image content which can yield undesired alterations of its semantics. This can affect the performance of the model on downstream tasks. Hence, in this paper, we ask whether we can augment image data in contrastive learning such that the task-relevant semantic content of an image is preserved. For this purpose, we propose to leverage saliency-based explanation methods to create content-preserving masked augmentations for contrastive learning. Our novel explanation-driven supervised contrastive learning (ExCon) methodology critically serves the dual goals of encouraging nearby image embeddings to have similar content and explanation. To quantify the impact of ExCon, we conduct experiments on the CIFAR-100 and the Tiny ImageNet datasets. We demonstrate that ExCon outperforms vanilla supervised contrastive learning in terms of classification, explanation quality, adversarial robustness as well as probabilistic calibration in the context of distributional shift.
In step with the digitalization of transportation, we are witnessing a growing range of path-based smart-city applications, e.g., travel-time estimation and travel path ranking. A temporal path(TP) that includes temporal information, e.g., departure time, into the path is fundamental to enable such applications. In this setting, it is essential to learn generic temporal path representations(TPRs) that consider spatial and temporal correlations simultaneously and that can be used in different applications, i.e., downstream tasks. Existing methods fail to achieve the goal since (i) supervised methods require large amounts of task-specific labels when training and thus fail to generalize the obtained TPRs to other tasks; (ii) through unsupervised methods can learn generic representations, they disregard the temporal aspect, leading to sub-optimal results. To contend with the limitations of existing solutions, we propose a Weakly-Supervised Contrastive (WSC) learning model. We first propose a temporal path encoder that encodes both the spatial and temporal information of a temporal path into a TPR. To train the encoder, we introduce weak labels that are easy and inexpensive to obtain and are relevant to different tasks, e.g., temporal labels indicating peak vs. off-peak hours from departure times. Based on the weak labels, we construct meaningful positive and negative temporal path samples by considering both spatial and temporal information, which facilities training the encoder using contrastive learning by pulling closer to the positive samples' representations while pushing away the negative samples' representations. To better guide contrastive learning, we propose a learning strategy based on Curriculum Learning such that the learning performs from easy to hard training instances. Experiments studies verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Spatio-temporal representation learning is critical for video self-supervised representation. Recent approaches mainly use contrastive learning and pretext tasks. However, these approaches learn representation by discriminating sampled instances via feature similarity in the latent space while ignoring the intermediate state of the learned representations, which limits the overall performance. In this work, taking into account the degree of similarity of sampled instances as the intermediate state, we propose a novel pretext task - spatio-temporal overlap rate (STOR) prediction. It stems from the observation that humans are capable of discriminating the overlap rates of videos in space and time. This task encourages the model to discriminate the STOR of two generated samples to learn the representations. Moreover, we employ a joint optimization combining pretext tasks with contrastive learning to further enhance the spatio-temporal representation learning. We also study the mutual influence of each component in the proposed scheme. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed STOR task can favor both contrastive learning and pretext tasks. The joint optimization scheme can significantly improve the spatio-temporal representation in video understanding. The code is available at //github.com/Katou2/CSTP.
To date, most existing self-supervised learning methods are designed and optimized for image classification. These pre-trained models can be sub-optimal for dense prediction tasks due to the discrepancy between image-level prediction and pixel-level prediction. To fill this gap, we aim to design an effective, dense self-supervised learning method that directly works at the level of pixels (or local features) by taking into account the correspondence between local features. We present dense contrastive learning, which implements self-supervised learning by optimizing a pairwise contrastive (dis)similarity loss at the pixel level between two views of input images. Compared to the baseline method MoCo-v2, our method introduces negligible computation overhead (only <1% slower), but demonstrates consistently superior performance when transferring to downstream dense prediction tasks including object detection, semantic segmentation and instance segmentation; and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Specifically, over the strong MoCo-v2 baseline, our method achieves significant improvements of 2.0% AP on PASCAL VOC object detection, 1.1% AP on COCO object detection, 0.9% AP on COCO instance segmentation, 3.0% mIoU on PASCAL VOC semantic segmentation and 1.8% mIoU on Cityscapes semantic segmentation. Code is available at: //git.io/AdelaiDet
In this paper, we focus on the self-supervised learning of visual correspondence using unlabeled videos in the wild. Our method simultaneously considers intra- and inter-video representation associations for reliable correspondence estimation. The intra-video learning transforms the image contents across frames within a single video via the frame pair-wise affinity. To obtain the discriminative representation for instance-level separation, we go beyond the intra-video analysis and construct the inter-video affinity to facilitate the contrastive transformation across different videos. By forcing the transformation consistency between intra- and inter-video levels, the fine-grained correspondence associations are well preserved and the instance-level feature discrimination is effectively reinforced. Our simple framework outperforms the recent self-supervised correspondence methods on a range of visual tasks including video object tracking (VOT), video object segmentation (VOS), pose keypoint tracking, etc. It is worth mentioning that our method also surpasses the fully-supervised affinity representation (e.g., ResNet) and performs competitively against the recent fully-supervised algorithms designed for the specific tasks (e.g., VOT and VOS).
In this paper, we propose a one-stage online clustering method called Contrastive Clustering (CC) which explicitly performs the instance- and cluster-level contrastive learning. To be specific, for a given dataset, the positive and negative instance pairs are constructed through data augmentations and then projected into a feature space. Therein, the instance- and cluster-level contrastive learning are respectively conducted in the row and column space by maximizing the similarities of positive pairs while minimizing those of negative ones. Our key observation is that the rows of the feature matrix could be regarded as soft labels of instances, and accordingly the columns could be further regarded as cluster representations. By simultaneously optimizing the instance- and cluster-level contrastive loss, the model jointly learns representations and cluster assignments in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experimental results show that CC remarkably outperforms 17 competitive clustering methods on six challenging image benchmarks. In particular, CC achieves an NMI of 0.705 (0.431) on the CIFAR-10 (CIFAR-100) dataset, which is an up to 19\% (39\%) performance improvement compared with the best baseline.
Deep supervised learning has achieved great success in the last decade. However, its deficiencies of dependence on manual labels and vulnerability to attacks have driven people to explore a better solution. As an alternative, self-supervised learning attracts many researchers for its soaring performance on representation learning in the last several years. Self-supervised representation learning leverages input data itself as supervision and benefits almost all types of downstream tasks. In this survey, we take a look into new self-supervised learning methods for representation in computer vision, natural language processing, and graph learning. We comprehensively review the existing empirical methods and summarize them into three main categories according to their objectives: generative, contrastive, and generative-contrastive (adversarial). We further investigate related theoretical analysis work to provide deeper thoughts on how self-supervised learning works. Finally, we briefly discuss open problems and future directions for self-supervised learning. An outline slide for the survey is provided.
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 the contrastive loss substantially improves the quality of the learned representations, and (3) contrastive learning benefits from larger batch sizes and more training steps compared to supervised learning. By combining these findings, we are able to considerably outperform previous methods for self-supervised and semi-supervised learning on ImageNet. A linear classifier trained on self-supervised representations learned by SimCLR achieves 76.5% top-1 accuracy, which is a 7% relative improvement over previous state-of-the-art, matching the performance of a supervised ResNet-50. When fine-tuned on only 1% of the labels, we achieve 85.8% top-5 accuracy, outperforming AlexNet with 100X fewer labels.
Learning with limited data is a key challenge for visual recognition. Few-shot learning methods address this challenge by learning an instance embedding function from seen classes and apply the function to instances from unseen classes with limited labels. This style of transfer learning is task-agnostic: the embedding function is not learned optimally discriminative with respect to the unseen classes, where discerning among them is the target task. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to adapt the embedding model to the target classification task, yielding embeddings that are task-specific and are discriminative. To this end, we employ a type of self-attention mechanism called Transformer to transform the embeddings from task-agnostic to task-specific by focusing on relating instances from the test instances to the training instances in both seen and unseen classes. Our approach also extends to both transductive and generalized few-shot classification, two important settings that have essential use cases. We verify the effectiveness of our model on two standard benchmark few-shot classification datasets --- MiniImageNet and CUB, where our approach demonstrates state-of-the-art empirical performance.