Understanding Contrastive Representation Learning through Geometry on the Hypersphere

Jul 12, 2020

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Contrastive representation learning has been outstandingly successful in practice. In this work, we identify two key properties related to the contrastive loss: (1) alignment (closeness) of features from positive pairs, and (2) uniformity of the induced distribution of the (normalized) features on the hypersphere. We prove that, asymptotically, the contrastive loss indeed optimizes these properties, and analyze their positive effects on downstream tasks. Empirically, we introduce an optimizable metric to quantify each property. Extensive experiments on standard image classification and depth prediction datasets confirm the strong agreement between both metrics and downstream task performance. Remarkably, directly optimizing for these two metrics leads to representations with comparable or better performance at downstream tasks than contrastive learning.

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The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) is the premier gathering of professionals dedicated to the advancement of the branch of artificial intelligence known as machine learning. ICML is globally renowned for presenting and publishing cutting-edge research on all aspects of machine learning used in closely related areas like artificial intelligence, statistics and data science, as well as important application areas such as machine vision, computational biology, speech recognition, and robotics. ICML is one of the fastest growing artificial intelligence conferences in the world. Participants at ICML span a wide range of backgrounds, from academic and industrial researchers, to entrepreneurs and engineers, to graduate students and postdocs.

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