Semantically-Conditioned Negative Samples for Efficient Contrastive Learning

Abstract: Negative sampling is a limiting factor w.r.t. the generalization of metric-learned neural networks. We show that uniform negative sampling provides little information about the class boundaries and thus propose three novel techniques for efficient negative sampling: drawing negative samples from (1) the top-$k$ most semantically similar classes, (2) the top-$k$ most semantically similar samples and (3) interpolating between contrastive latent representations to create pseudo negatives. Our experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and Tiny-ImageNet-200 show that our proposed \textit{Semantically Conditioned Negative Sampling} and Latent Mixup lead to consistent performance improvements. In the standard supervised learning setting, on average we increase test accuracy by 1.52\% percentage points on CIFAR-10 across various network architectures. In the knowledge distillation setting, (1) the performance of student networks increase by 4.56\% percentage points on Tiny-ImageNet-200 and 3.29\% on CIFAR-100 over student networks trained with no teacher and (2) 1.23\% and 1.72\% respectively over a \textit{hard-to-beat} baseline (Hinton et al., 2015).