skip to main content
Explore Scholarly Publications and Datasets in the NSF-PAR

Title: Understanding Self-Supervised Learning Dynamics without Contrastive Pairs
While contrastive approaches of self-supervised learning (SSL) learn representations by minimizing the distance between two augmented views of the same data point (positive pairs) and maximizing views from different data points (negative pairs), recent \emph{non-contrastive} SSL (e.g., BYOL and SimSiam) show remarkable performance {\it without} negative pairs, with an extra learnable predictor and a stop-gradient operation. A fundamental question rises: why they do not collapse into trivial representation? In this paper, we answer this question via a simple theoretical study and propose a novel approach, \ourmethod{}, that \emph{directly} sets the linear predictor based on the statistics of its inputs, rather than trained with gradient update. On ImageNet, it performs comparably with more complex two-layer non-linear predictors that employ BatchNorm and outperforms linear predictor by 2.5 in 300-epoch training (and 5 in 60-epoch). \ourmethod{} is motivated by our theoretical study of the nonlinear learning dynamics of non-contrastive SSL in simple linear networks. Our study yields conceptual insights into how non-contrastive SSL methods learn, how they avoid representational collapse, and how multiple factors, like predictor networks, stop-gradients, exponential moving averages, and weight decay all come into play. Our simple theory recapitulates the results of real-world ablation studies in both STL-10 and ImageNet. more » Code is released. « less
Authors:
; ;
Award ID(s):
1845166
Publication Date:
NSF-PAR ID:
10293705
Journal Name:
International conference on machine learning
Volume:
139
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; ( , International Symposium on Information Theory)
    We consider the problem of finding a two-layer neural network with sigmoid, rectified linear unit (ReLU), or binary step activation functions that "fits" a training data set as accurately as possible as quantified by the training error; and study the following question: \emph{does a low training error guarantee that the norm of the output layer (outer norm) itself is small?} We answer affirmatively this question for the case of non-negative output weights. Using a simple covering number argument, we establish that under quite mild distributional assumptions on the input/label pairs; any such network achieving a small training error on polynomially many data necessarily has a well-controlled outer norm. Notably, our results (a) have a polynomial (in d) sample complexity, (b) are independent of the number of hidden units (which can potentially be very high), (c) are oblivious to the training algorithm; and (d) require quite mild assumptions on the data (in particular the input vector X∈ℝd need not have independent coordinates). We then leverage our bounds to establish generalization guarantees for such networks through \emph{fat-shattering dimension}, a scale-sensitive measure of the complexity class that the network architectures we investigate belong to. Notably, our generalization bounds also have good sample complexitymore »(polynomials in d with a low degree), and are in fact near-linear for some important cases of interest.« less
  2. ( , Advances in neural information processing systems)
    Unsupervised learning has recently made exceptional progress because of the development of more effective contrastive learning methods. However, CNNs are prone to depend on low-level features that humans deem non-semantic. This dependency has been conjectured to induce a lack of robustness to image perturbations or domain shift. In this paper, we show that by generating carefully designed negative samples, contrastive learning can learn more robust representations with less dependence on such features. Contrastive learning utilizes positive pairs which preserve semantic information while perturbing superficial features in the training images. Similarly, we propose to generate negative samples in a reversed way, where only the superfluous instead of the semantic features are preserved. We develop two methods, texture-based and patch-based augmentations, to generate negative samples. These samples achieve better generalization, especially under out-of-domain settings. We also analyze our method and the generated texture-based samples, showing that texture features are indispensable in classifying particular ImageNet classes and especially finer classes. We also show that the model bias between texture and shape features favors them differently under different test settings.
  3. ; ; ; ; ; ( , Advances in neural information processing systems)
    Koyejo S. ; Mohamed S. ; Agarwal A. ; Belgrave D. ; Cho K. ; Oh A. (Ed.)
    This paper targets at improving the generalizability of hypergraph neural networks in the low-label regime, through applying the contrastive learning approach from images/graphs (we refer to it as HyperGCL). We focus on the following question: How to construct contrastive views for hypergraphs via augmentations? We provide the solutions in two folds. First, guided by domain knowledge, we fabricate two schemes to augment hyperedges with higher-order relations encoded, and adopt three vertex augmentation strategies from graph-structured data. Second, in search of more effective views in a data-driven manner, we for the first time propose a hypergraph generative model to generate augmented views, and then an end-to-end differentiable pipeline to jointly learn hypergraph augmentations and model parameters. Our technical innovations are reflected in designing both fabricated and generative augmentations of hypergraphs. The experimental findings include: (i) Among fabricated augmentations in HyperGCL, augmenting hyperedges provides the most numerical gains, implying that higher-order information in structures is usually more downstream-relevant; (ii) Generative augmentations do better in preserving higher-order information to further benefit generalizability; (iii) HyperGCL also boosts robustness and fairness in hypergraph representation learning. Codes are released at https://github.com/weitianxin/HyperGCL.
  4. ; ; ( , Graph Communal Contrastive Learning)
    Graph representation learning is crucial for many real-world ap- plications (e.g. social relation analysis). A fundamental problem for graph representation learning is how to effectively learn rep- resentations without human labeling, which is usually costly and time-consuming. Graph contrastive learning (GCL) addresses this problem by pulling the positive node pairs (or similar nodes) closer while pushing the negative node pairs (or dissimilar nodes) apart in the representation space. Despite the success of the existing GCL methods, they primarily sample node pairs based on the node- level proximity yet the community structures have rarely been taken into consideration. As a result, two nodes from the same community might be sampled as a negative pair. We argue that the community information should be considered to identify node pairs in the same communities, where the nodes insides are seman- tically similar. To address this issue, we propose a novel Graph Communal Contrastive Learning (𝑔𝐶𝑜𝑜𝐿) framework to jointly learn the community partition and learn node representations in an end-to-end fashion. Specifically, the proposed 𝑔𝐶𝑜𝑜𝐿 consists of two components: a Dense Community Aggregation (𝐷𝑒𝐶𝐴) algo- rithm for community detection and a Reweighted Self-supervised Cross-contrastive (𝑅𝑒𝑆𝐶) training scheme to utilize the community information. Additionally, the real-worldmore »graphs are complex and often consist of multiple views. In this paper, we demonstrate that the proposed 𝑔𝐶𝑜𝑜𝐿 can also be naturally adapted to multiplex graphs. Finally, we comprehensively evaluate the proposed 𝑔𝐶𝑜𝑜𝐿 on a variety of real-world graphs. The experimental results show that the 𝑔𝐶𝑜𝑜𝐿 outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.« less
  5. ; ; ; ; ; ( , International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR))
    We study how neural networks trained by gradient descent extrapolate, i.e., what they learn outside the support of the training distribution. Previous works report mixed empirical results when extrapolating with neural networks: while feedforward neural networks, a.k.a. multilayer perceptrons (MLPs), do not extrapolate well in certain simple tasks, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) – structured networks with MLP modules – have shown some success in more complex tasks. Working towards a theoretical explanation, we identify conditions under which MLPs and GNNs extrapolate well. First, we quantify the observation that ReLU MLPs quickly converge to linear functions along any direction from the origin, which implies that ReLU MLPs do not extrapolate most nonlinear functions. But, they can provably learn a linear target function when the training distribution is sufficiently “diverse”. Second, in connection to analyzing the successes and limitations of GNNs, these results suggest a hypothesis for which we provide theoretical and empirical evidence: the success of GNNs in extrapolating algorithmic tasks to new data (e.g., larger graphs or edge weights) relies on encoding task-specific non-linearities in the architecture or features. Our theoretical analysis builds on a connection of over-parameterized networks to the neural tangent kernel. Empirically, our theory holds across differentmore »training settings.« less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email