Hallucination Improves the Performance of Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning

Jing Wu, Jennifer Hobbs, Naira Hovakimyan; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 16132-16143

Contrastive learning models based on Siamese structure have demonstrated remarkable performance in self-supervised learning. Such a success of contrastive learning relies on two conditions, including a sufficient number of positive pairs and adequate variations between them. If the conditions are not met, these frameworks will lack semantic contrast and be fragile on overfitting. To address these two issues, we propose Hallucinator that could efficiently generate additional positive samples for further contrast. The Hallucinator creates new data in the feature space, thus introducing nearly negligible computation. Moreover, we reduce the mutual information of hallucinated pairs and smooth them through non-linear operations. This process helps avoid over-confident contrastive learning models during the training and achieves more robust transformation-invariant feature embeddings. Remarkably, we empirically prove that the proposed Hallucinator generalizes well to various contrastive learning models, including MoCoV1&V2, SimCLR and SimSiam. Under the linear classification protocol, a stable accuracy gain is achieved, ranging from 0.3% to 3.0% on CIFAR10&100, Tiny ImageNet, STL-10 and ImageNet. The improvement is also observed in transferring pre-train encoders to the downstream tasks, including object detection and segmentation.