# Instance Similarity Learning for Unsupervised Feature Representation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.02721 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02721/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [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)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06434/) (2015)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5151/) (2013)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07379/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Representations by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09246/) (2016)
- [Learning deep representations by mutual information estimation and maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06670/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning by Context Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05192/) (2015)
- [Self-Supervised Learning of Pretext-Invariant Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01991/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Deep Embedding for Clustering Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06335/) (2015)
- [CornerNet: Detecting Objects as Paired Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.01244/) (2018)
- [SphereFace: Deep Hypersphere Embedding for Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08063/) (2017)
- [Learning Representations by Maximizing Mutual Information Across Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00910/) (2019)
- [Data-Efficient Image Recognition with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09272/) (2019)
- [Adversarial Feature Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.09782/) (2016)
- [Large Scale Adversarial Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02544/) (2019)
- [Towards K-means-friendly Spaces: Simultaneous Deep Learning and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.04794/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Embedding Learning via Invariant and Spreading Instance Feature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03436/) (2019)
- [Split-Brain Autoencoders: Unsupervised Learning by Cross-Channel Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09842/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [SlotDiffusion: Object-Centric Generative Modeling with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11281/) (2023)
- [Beyond Instance Discrimination: Relation-aware Contrastive Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01796/) (2022)
- [Enhancing Generalizability of Representation Learning for Data-Efficient 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11283/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we propose an instance similarity learning (ISL) method for unsupervised feature representation. Conventional methods assign close instance pairs in the feature space with high similarity, which usually leads to wrong pairwise relationship for large neighborhoods because the Euclidean distance fails to depict the true semantic similarity on the feature manifold. On the contrary, our method mines the feature manifold in an unsupervised manner, through which the semantic similarity among instances is learned in order to obtain discriminative representations. Specifically, we employ the Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) to mine the underlying feature manifold, where the generated features are applied as the proxies to progressively explore the feature manifold so that the semantic similarity among instances is acquired as reliable pseudo supervision. Extensive experiments on image classification demonstrate the superiority of our method compared with the state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/ZiweiWangTHU/ISL.git.