Semantics-Consistent Feature Search for Self-Supervised Visual Representation Learning
This addresses a specific issue in self-supervised visual representation learning, offering an incremental improvement for computer vision applications.
The paper tackles the problem of undesirable semantic inconsistencies in contrastive self-supervised learning by introducing a semantics-consistent feature search method, which improves performance and achieves state-of-the-art results on various downstream tasks.
In contrastive self-supervised learning, the common way to learn discriminative representation is to pull different augmented "views" of the same image closer while pushing all other images further apart, which has been proven to be effective. However, it is unavoidable to construct undesirable views containing different semantic concepts during the augmentation procedure. It would damage the semantic consistency of representation to pull these augmentations closer in the feature space indiscriminately. In this study, we introduce feature-level augmentation and propose a novel semantics-consistent feature search (SCFS) method to mitigate this negative effect. The main idea of SCFS is to adaptively search semantics-consistent features to enhance the contrast between semantics-consistent regions in different augmentations. Thus, the trained model can learn to focus on meaningful object regions, improving the semantic representation ability. Extensive experiments conducted on different datasets and tasks demonstrate that SCFS effectively improves the performance of self-supervised learning and achieves state-of-the-art performance on different downstream tasks.