Concurrent Discrimination and Alignment for Self-Supervised Feature Learning

Anjan Dutta, Massimiliano Mancini, Zeynep Akata; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) Workshops, 2021, pp. 2189-2198

Existing self-supervised learning methods learn representation by means of pretext tasks which are either (1) discriminating that explicitly specify which features should be separated or (2) aligning that precisely indicate which features should be closed together, but ignore the fact how to jointly and principally define which features to be repelled and which ones to be attracted. In this work, we combine the positive aspects of the discriminating and aligning methods, and design a hybrid method that addresses the above issue. Our method explicitly specifies the repulsion and attraction mechanism respectively by discriminative predictive task and concurrently maximizing mutual information between paired views sharing redundant information. We qualitatively and quantitatively show that our proposed model learns better features that are more effective for the diverse downstream tasks ranging from classification to semantic segmentation. Our experiments on nine established benchmarks show that the proposed model consistently outperforms the existing state-of-the-art results of self-supervised and transfer learning protocol.