Crafting Better Contrastive Views for Siamese Representation Learning

Xiangyu Peng, Kai Wang, Zheng Zhu, Mang Wang, Yang You; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022, pp. 16031-16040

Recent self-supervised contrastive learning methods greatly benefit from the Siamese structure that aims at minimizing distances between positive pairs. For high performance Siamese representation learning, one of the keys is to design good contrastive pairs. Most previous works simply apply random sampling to make different crops of the same image, which overlooks the semantic information that may degrade the quality of views. In this work, we propose ContrastiveCrop, which could effectively generate better crops for Siamese representation learning. Firstly, a semantic-aware object localization strategy is proposed within the training process in a fully unsupervised manner. This guides us to generate contrastive views which could avoid most false positives (i.e., object v.s. background). Moreover, we empirically find that views with similar appearances are trivial for the Siamese model training. Thus, a center-suppressed sampling is further designed to enlarge the variance of crops. Remarkably, our method takes a careful consideration of positive pairs for contrastive learning with negligible extra training overhead. As a plug-and-play and framework-agnostic module, ContrastiveCrop consistently improves SimCLR, MoCo, BYOL, SimSiam by 0.4% 2.0% classification accuracy on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Tiny ImageNet, and STL-10. Superior results are also achieved on downstream detection and segmentation tasks when pre-trained on ImageNet-1K.