2023/04/06 by Hengkui Dong, Dong, Hengkui, Xianzhong Long +5 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2304.02971
openalex publication_date 2023/04/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Contrastive learning has emerged as an essential approach for self-supervised learning in visual representation learning. The central objective of contrastive learning is to maximize the similarities between two augmented versions of an image (positive pairs), while minimizing the similarities between different images (negative pairs). Recent studies have demonstrated that harder negative samples, i.e., those that are more difficult to differentiate from the anchor sample, perform a more crucial function in contrastive learning. This paper proposes a novel feature-level method, namely sampling synthetic hard negative samples for contrastive learning (SSCL), to exploit harder negative samples more effectively. Specifically, 1) we generate more and harder negative samples by mixing negative samples, and then sample them by controlling the contrast of anchor sample with the other negative samples; 2) considering the possibility of false negative samples, we further debias the negative samples. Our proposed method improves the classification performance on different image datasets and can be readily integrated into existing methods.