AdCo: Adversarial Contrast for Efficient Learning of Unsupervised Representations From Self-Trained Negative Adversaries

Qianjiang Hu, Xiao Wang, Wei Hu, Guo-Jun Qi; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021, pp. 1074-1083

Abstract


Contrastive learning relies on constructing a collection of negative examples that are sufficiently hard to discriminate against positive queries when their representations are self-trained. Existing contrastive learning methods either maintain a queue of negative samples over mini-batches while only a small portion of them are updated in an iteration or only use the other examples from the current minibatch as negatives. They could not closely track the change of the learned representation over iterations by updating the entire queue as a whole or discard the useful information from the past mini-batches. Alternatively, we present to directly learn a set of negative adversaries playing against the self-trained representation. Two players, the representation network and negative adversaries are alternately updated to obtain the most challenging negative examples against which the representation of positive queries will be trained to discriminate. We further show that the negative adversaries are updated towards a weighted combination of positive queries by maximizing the adversarial contrastive loss, thereby allowing them to closely track the change of representations over time. Experiment results demonstrate the proposed Adversarial Contrastive (AdCo) model not only achieves superior performances (a top-1 accuracy of 73.2% over 200 epochs and 75.7% over 800 epochs with linear evaluation on ImageNet), but also can be pre-trained more efficiently with much shorter GPU time and fewer epochs. The source code is available at https://github.com/maple-research-lab/AdCo.

Related Material


[pdf] [supp] [arXiv]
[bibtex]
@InProceedings{Hu_2021_CVPR, author = {Hu, Qianjiang and Wang, Xiao and Hu, Wei and Qi, Guo-Jun}, title = {AdCo: Adversarial Contrast for Efficient Learning of Unsupervised Representations From Self-Trained Negative Adversaries}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)}, month = {June}, year = {2021}, pages = {1074-1083} }