Tuned Contrastive Learning

Chaitanya Animesh, Manmohan Chandraker; Proceedings of the Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2025, pp. 7225-7234

In recent times contrastive learning based loss functions have become increasingly popular for visual self-supervised representation learning owing to their state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. Most of the modern contrastive learning methods generalize only to one positive and multiple negatives per anchor in a batch. A recent state-of-the-art contrastive loss called supervised contrastive (SupCon) loss extends self-supervised contrastive learning to supervised setting by generalizing to multiple positives and negatives in a batch and improves upon the cross-entropy loss. In this paper we propose a novel contrastive loss function -- Tuned Contrastive Learning (TCL) loss that generalizes to multiple positives and negatives in a batch and offers parameters to tune and improve the gradient responses from hard positives and hard negatives. We provide theoretical analysis of our loss function's gradient response and show mathematically how it is better than that of SupCon loss. We empirically compare our loss function with SupCon loss and cross-entropy loss in supervised setting on multiple classification-task datasets to show its effectiveness. We also show the stability of our loss function to a range of hyper-parameter settings. Unlike SupCon loss which is only applied to supervised setting we show how to extend TCL to self-supervised setting and empirically compare it with various SOTA self-supervised learning methods. Hence we show that TCL loss achieves performance on par with SOTA methods in both supervised and self-supervised settings.