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Poster
Improving Self-Supervised Learning by Characterizing Idealized Representations
Yann Dubois · Stefano Ermon · Tatsunori Hashimoto · Percy Liang

Tue Nov 29 02:00 PM -- 04:00 PM (PST) @ Hall J #905
in Poster Session 2 »

Despite the empirical successes of self-supervised learning (SSL) methods, it is unclear what characteristics of their representations lead to high downstream accuracies. In this work, we characterize properties that SSL representations should ideally satisfy. Specifically, we prove necessary and sufficient conditions such that for any task invariant to given data augmentations, probes (e.g., linear or MLP) trained on that representation attain perfect accuracy. These requirements lead to a unifying conceptual framework for improving existing SSL methods and deriving new ones. For contrastive learning, our framework prescribes simple but significant improvements to previous methods such as using asymmetric projection heads. For non-contrastive learning, we use our framework to derive a simple and novel objective. Our resulting SSL algorithms outperform baselines on standard benchmarks, including SwAV+multicrops on linear probing of ImageNet.

Keywords: Representation Learning · Self-supervised learning · machine learning · contrastive learning · Invariances
[ Paper]  [ Poster]  [ OpenReview] 

Author Information

Yann Dubois (Stanford University)
Stefano Ermon (Stanford)
Tatsunori Hashimoto (Stanford)
Percy Liang (Stanford University)
Percy Liang

Percy Liang is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University (B.S. from MIT, 2004; Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, 2011). His research spans machine learning and natural language processing, with the goal of developing trustworthy agents that can communicate effectively with people and improve over time through interaction. Specific topics include question answering, dialogue, program induction, interactive learning, and reliable machine learning. His awards include the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award (2016), an NSF CAREER Award (2016), a Sloan Research Fellowship (2015), and a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship (2014).

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