Align Representations with Base: A New Approach to Self-Supervised Learning

Existing symmetric contrastive learning methods suffer from collapses (complete and dimensional) or quadratic complexity of objectives. Departure from these methods which maximize mutual information of two generated views, along either instance or feature dimension, the proposed paradigm introduces intermediate variables at the feature level, and maximizes the consistency between variables and representations of each view. Spec(fically, the proposed intermediate variables are the nearest group of base vectors to representations. Hence, we call the proposed method ARB (Align Representations with Base). Compared with other symmetric approaches, ARB 1) does not require negative pairs, which leads the complexity of the overall objective function is in linear order, 2) reduces feature redundancy, increasing the information density of training samples, 3) is more robust to output dimension size, which outperforms previous feature-wise arts over 28% Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-100 under low-dimension settings.