# Unsupervised Embedding Learning from Uncertainty Momentum Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.08892 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08892/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jul 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [Prototypical Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04966/) (2020)
- [Deep Metric Learning via Lifted Structured Feature Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06452/) (2015)
- [Unsupervised Embedding Learning via Invariant and Spreading Instance Feature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03436/) (2019)
- [Local Aggregation for Unsupervised Learning of Visual Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12355/) (2019)
- [Bounding Box Regression with Uncertainty for Accurate Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.08545/) (2018)
- [Gaussian YOLOv3: An Accurate and Fast Object Detector Using Localization Uncertainty for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04620/) (2019)
- [AdCo: Adversarial Contrast for Efficient Learning of Unsupervised Representations from Self-Trained Negative Adversaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08435/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Deep Learning by Neighbourhood Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11567/) (2019)
- [Reducing Uncertainty in Undersampled MRI Reconstruction with Active Acquisition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.03051/) (2019)
- [Local Descriptors Optimized for Average Precision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05312/) (2018)
- [Rethinking Feature Distribution for Loss Functions in Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02988/) (2018)
- [MonoLoco: Monocular 3D Pedestrian Localization and Uncertainty Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06059/) (2019)
- [Mining on Manifolds: Metric Learning without Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11095/) (2018)
- [U-CAM: Visual Explanation using Uncertainty based Class Activation Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06306/) (2019)
- [Hashing as Tie-Aware Learning to Rank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08562/) (2017)
- [Linear Maximum Margin Classifier for Learning from Uncertain Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.03892/) (2015)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing popular unsupervised embedding learning methods focus on enhancing the instance-level local discrimination of the given unlabeled images by exploring various negative data. However, the existed sample outliers which exhibit large intra-class divergences or small inter-class variations severely limit their learning performance. We justify that the performance limitation is caused by the gradient vanishing on these sample outliers. Moreover, the shortage of positive data and disregard for global discrimination consideration also pose critical issues for unsupervised learning but are always ignored by existing methods. To handle these issues, we propose a novel solution to explicitly model and directly explore the uncertainty of the given unlabeled learning samples. Instead of learning a deterministic feature point for each sample in the embedding space, we propose to represent a sample by a stochastic Gaussian with the mean vector depicting its space localization and covariance vector representing the sample uncertainty. We leverage such uncertainty modeling as momentum to the learning which is helpful to tackle the outliers. Furthermore, abundant positive candidates can be readily drawn from the learned instance-specific distributions which are further adopted to mitigate the aforementioned issues. Thorough rationale analyses and extensive experiments are presented to verify our superiority.