Preservational Learning Improves Self-Supervised Medical Image Models by Reconstructing Diverse Contexts

Hong-Yu Zhou, Chixiang Lu, Sibei Yang, Xiaoguang Han, Yizhou Yu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021, pp. 3499-3509

Preserving maximal information is the basic principle of designing self-supervised learning methodologies. To reach this goal, contrastive learning adopts an implicit way which is contrasting image pairs. However, we believe it is not fully optimal to simply use the contrastive estimation for preservation. Moreover, it is necessary and complemental to introduce an explicit solution to preserve more information. From this perspective, we introduce Preservational Learning to reconstruct diverse image contexts in order to preserve more information in learned representations. Together with the contrastive loss, we present Preservational Contrastive Representation Learning (PCRL) for learning self-supervised medical representations. PCRL provides very competitive results under the pretraining-finetuning protocol, outperforming both self-supervised and supervised counterparts in 5 classification/segmentation tasks substantially.