Cited by 106Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot LearningAdvanced Neural Network ApplicationsMachine Learning and Data Classification

When Does Contrastive Visual Representation Learning Work?

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Cole, Elijah, Yang, Xuan, Wilber, Kimberly, Aodha, Oisin Mac, Belongie, Serge·2022·2022 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)

Abstract

Recent self-supervised representation learning techniques have largely closed the gap between supervised and unsupervised learning on ImageNet classification. While the particulars of pretraining on ImageNet are now relatively well understood, the field still lacks widely accepted best practices for replicating this success on other datasets. As a first step in this direction, we study contrastive self-supervised learning on four diverse large-scale datasets. By looking through the lenses of data quantity, data domain, data quality, and task granularity, we provide new insights into the necessary conditions for successful self-supervised learning. Our key findings include observations such as: (i) the benefit of additional pretraining data beyond 500k images is modest, (ii) adding pretraining images from another domain does not lead to more general representations, (iii) corrupted pretraining images have a disparate impact on supervised and self-supervised pretraining, and (iv) contrastive learning lags far behind supervised learning on finegrained visual classification tasks.

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  • Performance on the ImageNet and downstream datasets is not always consistent due to the inconstancy of data distribution, data domain, and task objective.

    “However, recent research [112], [113] suggested that performance on the ImageNet and downstream datasets is not always consistent due to the inconstancy of data distribution, data domain, and task objective.”

    From Large-Scale Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation (2023) · cites this paper as [112]

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Research works printed but not linked: 5

  1. Linus Ericsson, Henry Gouk, and Timothy M Hospedales. How well do self-supervised models transfer? In CVPR, 2021. 1, 3
  2. Spyros Gidaris, Praveer Singh, and Nikos Komodakis. Un- supervised representation learning by predicting image rota- tions. In ICLR, 2018. 2
  3. Bart Thomee, David A Shamma, Gerald Friedland, Ben- jamin Elizalde, Karl Ni, Douglas Poland, Damian Borth, and Li-Jia Li. Yfcc100m: The new data in multimedia research. Communications of the ACM, 2016. 3
  4. Yonglong Tian, Dilip Krishnan, and Phillip Isola. Con- trastive multiview coding. In ECCV, 2020. 2
  5. Grant Van Horn, Elijah Cole, Sara Beery, Kimberly Wilber, Serge Belongie, and Oisin Mac Aodha. Benchmarking rep- resentation learning for natural world image collections. In CVPR, 2021. 2, 12, 15, 16

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Authors
Cole, E., Yang, X., Wilber, K., Aodha, O. M., & Belongie, S.
Affiliations
  • California Institute of Technology (US)
  • Google (United States) (US)
  • Google
  • The Alan Turing Institute (GB)
  • University of Copenhagen (DK)
Venue
2022 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
Publisher
IEEE
Published
2022-06
Pages
01-10
ISSN
1063-6919 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W3160314846
Cited by
105
References
78
Citations by year
2026: 7 · 2025: 21 · 2024: 19 · 2023: 34 · 2022: 13 · 2021: 11
FWCI
12.03
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition/Proceedings - IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition/Proceedings (publishedVersion)
  • CaltechAUTHORS (California Institute of Technology) (acceptedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • Research at the University of Copenhagen (University of Copenhagen) (submittedVersion)
  • Edinburgh Research Explorer (University of Edinburgh) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
  • CaltechAUTHORS (California Institute of Technology) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
  • National Science Foundation (1745301)
  • California Institute of Technology
  • Resnick Sustainability Institute for Science, Energy and Sustainability, California Institute of Technology
  • McGill University
  • Danmarks Grundforskningsfond
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Advanced Neural Network Applications
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Machine Learning and Data Classification
Keywords
contrastive learning, self-supervised representation learning, domain generalization, image corruptions, fine-grained image classification, ImageNet pre-training, transfer learning

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