Rethinking Samples Selection for Contrastive Learning: Mining of Potential Samples

Contrastive learning predicts whether two images belong to the same category by training a model to make their feature representations as close or as far away as possible. In this paper, we rethink how to mine samples in contrastive learning, unlike other methods, our approach is more comprehensive, taking into account both positive and negative samples, and mining potential samples from two aspects: First, for positive samples, we consider both the augmented sample views obtained by data augmentation and the mined sample views through data mining. Then, we weight and combine them using both soft and hard weighting strategies. Second, considering the existence of uninformative negative samples and false negative samples in the negative samples, we analyze the negative samples from the gradient perspective and finally mine negative samples that are neither too hard nor too easy as potential negative samples, i.e., those negative samples that are close to positive samples. The experiments show the obvious advantages of our method compared with some traditional self-supervised methods. Our method achieves 88.57%, 61.10%, and 36.69% top-1 accuracy on CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and TinyImagenet, respectively.

Synthetic Hard Negative Samples for Contrastive Learning

Contrastive learning has emerged as an essential approach for self-supervised learning in visual representation learning. The central objective of contrastive learning is to maximize the similarities between two augmented versions of an image (positive pairs), while minimizing the similarities between different images (negative pairs). Recent studies have demonstrated that harder negative samples, i.e., those that are more difficult to differentiate from the anchor sample, perform a more crucial function in contrastive learning. This paper proposes a novel feature-level method, namely sampling synthetic hard negative samples for contrastive learning (SSCL), to exploit harder negative samples more effectively. Specifically, 1) we generate more and harder negative samples by mixing negative samples, and then sample them by controlling the contrast of anchor sample with the other negative samples; 2) considering the possibility of false negative samples, we further debias the negative samples. Our proposed method improves the classification performance on different image datasets and can be readily integrated into existing methods.