mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Instance-wise Hard Negative Example Generation for Contrastive Learning in Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation

arXiv 2108.04547 ↗First posted 10 Aug 2021cs.CVcited by 45

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

Contrastive learning shows great potential in unpaired image-to-image translation, but sometimes the translated results are in poor quality and the contents are not preserved consistently. In this paper, we uncover that the negative examples play a critical role in the performance of contrastive learning for image translation. The negative examples in previous methods are randomly sampled from the patches of different positions in the source image, which are not effective to push the positive examples close to the query examples. To address this issue, we present instance-wise hard Negative Example Generation for Contrastive learning in Unpaired image-to-image Translation (NEGCUT). Specifically, we train a generator to produce negative examples online. The generator is novel from two perspectives: 1) it is instance-wise which means that the generated examples are based on the input image, and 2) it can generate hard negative examples since it is trained with an adversarial loss. With the generator, the performance of unpaired image-to-image translation is significantly improved. Experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed NEGCUT framework achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to previous methods.

Key facts. Cited by 45 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 50 of its 61 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 10 Aug 2021.

Builds on

50 of 61 references.

References · 50

  1. 2014Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimizationcited by 36,960
  2. 2020A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representationscited by 11,979
  3. 2018Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Codingcited by 7,662
  4. 2019Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learningcited by 7,482
  5. 2015Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Visioncited by 5,451
  6. 2016Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networkscited by 4,510
  7. 2016The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understandingcited by 4,427
  8. 2016Improved Techniques for Training GANscited by 2,938
  9. 2016Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolutioncited by 2,678
  10. 2017Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptationcited by 1,309
  11. 2019Semantic Image Synthesis with Spatially-Adaptive Normalizationcited by 1,295
  12. 2018Learning deep representations by mutual information estimation and maximizationcited by 1,265
38 more
  1. 2017High-Resolution Image Synthesis and Semantic Manipulation with Conditional GANscited by 1,176
  2. 2016Colorful Image Colorizationcited by 1,113
  3. 2019StarGAN v2: Diverse Image Synthesis for Multiple Domainscited by 1,095
  4. 2017CyCADA: Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Domain Adaptationcited by 1,079
  5. 2017StarGAN: Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translationcited by 1,036
  6. 2016Least Squares Generative Adversarial Networkscited by 1,000
  7. 2018Multimodal Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translationcited by 795
  8. 2019Learning Representations by Maximizing Mutual Information Across Viewscited by 733
  9. 2019Data-Efficient Image Recognition with Contrastive Predictive Codingcited by 672
  10. 2020Contrastive Learning for Unpaired Image-to-Image Translationcited by 637
  11. 2017Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation Networkscited by 602
  12. 2016Training Region-based Object Detectors with Online Hard Example Miningcited by 577
  13. 2020Hard Negative Mixing for Contrastive Learningcited by 399
  14. 2017DualGAN: Unsupervised Dual Learning for Image-to-Image Translationcited by 310
  15. 2016Unsupervised Pixel-Level Domain Adaptation with Generative Adversarial Networkscited by 307
  16. 2018Diverse Image-to-Image Translation via Disentangled Representationscited by 296
  17. 2017Toward Multimodal Image-to-Image Translationcited by 295
  18. 2017Dilated Residual Networkscited by 293
  19. 2017Learning to Discover Cross-Domain Relations with Generative Adversarial Networkscited by 278
  20. 2016FCNs in the Wild: Pixel-level Adversarial and Constraint-based Adaptationcited by 242
  21. 2017Photographic Image Synthesis with Cascaded Refinement Networkscited by 223
  22. 2019Few-Shot Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translationcited by 222
  23. 2019U-GAT-IT: Unsupervised Generative Attentional Networks with Adaptive Layer-Instance Normalization for Image-to-Image Translationcited by 186
  24. 2017Deep Photo Style Transfercited by 168
  25. 2019Style Transfer by Relaxed Optimal Transport and Self-Similaritycited by 167
  26. 2019Mode Seeking Generative Adversarial Networks for Diverse Image Synthesiscited by 138
  27. 2017Real-Time User-Guided Image Colorization with Learned Deep Priorscited by 123
  28. 2015Online Batch Selection for Faster Training of Neural Networkscited by 121
  29. 2018Geometry-Consistent Generative Adversarial Networks for One-Sided Unsupervised Domain Mappingcited by 113
  30. 2017One-Sided Unsupervised Domain Mappingcited by 91
  31. 2020AdCo: Adversarial Contrast for Efficient Learning of Unsupervised Representations from Self-Trained Negative Adversariescited by 90
  32. 2020Instance-aware Image Colorizationcited by 76
  33. 2019TransGaGa: Geometry-Aware Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translationcited by 40
  34. 2019Attention-Guided Generative Adversarial Networks for Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translationcited by 39
  35. 2017XGAN: Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation for Many-to-Many Mappingscited by 27
  36. 2019Harmonic Unpaired Image-to-image Translationcited by 18
  37. 2014Fracking Deep Convolutional Image Descriptorscited by 7
  38. 2017Deep Koalarization: Image Colorization using CNNs and Inception-ResNet-v2cited by 7

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2022: 9; 2023: 20; 2024: 10; 2025: 5; 2026: 1.

45 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2023Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation via Neural Schr"odinger Bridgecited by 96
  2. 2022Dual Temperature Helps Contrastive Learning Without Many Negative Samples: Towards Understanding and Simplifying MoCocited by 52
  3. 2022Exploring Patch-wise Semantic Relation for Contrastive Learning in Image-to-Image Translation Taskscited by 42
  4. 2022Modulated Contrast for Versatile Image Synthesiscited by 23
  5. 2022Unpaired Deep Image Dehazing Using Contrastive Disentanglement Learningcited by 21
  6. 2024StegoGAN: Leveraging Steganography for Non-Bijective Image-to-Image Translationcited by 18
  7. 2023Synthetic optical coherence tomography angiographs for detailed retinal vessel segmentation without human annotationscited by 16
  8. 2022ITTR: Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation with Transformerscited by 15
  9. 2024Does Negative Sampling Matter? A Review with Insights into its Theory and Applicationscited by 14
  10. 2023Spectral Normalization and Dual Contrastive Regularization for Image-to-Image Translationcited by 11
  11. 2023Hierarchical Skeleton Meta-Prototype Contrastive Learning with Hard Skeleton Mining for Unsupervised Person Re-Identificationcited by 9
  12. 2023Exploring Semantic Consistency in Unpaired Image Translation to Generate Data for Surgical Applicationscited by 9
33 more
  1. 2022Maximum Spatial Perturbation Consistency for Unpaired Image-to-Image Translationcited by 8
  2. 2022Rethinking the Paradigm of Content Constraints in Unpaired Image-to-Image Translationcited by 7
  3. 2022Exploring Negatives in Contrastive Learning for Unpaired Image-to-Image Translationcited by 6
  4. 2023Multi-cropping Contrastive Learning and Domain Consistency for Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translationcited by 5
  5. 2023TPSeNCE: Towards Artifact-Free Realistic Rain Generation for Deraining and Object Detection in Raincited by 5
  6. 2025Rotation-Adaptive Point Cloud Domain Generalization via Intricate Orientation Learningcited by 5
  7. 2023Energy-Guided Diffusion Model for CBCT-to-CT Synthesiscited by 4
  8. 2023Probabilistic Self-supervised Learning via Scoring Rules Minimizationcited by 4
  9. 2023DimCL: Dimensional Contrastive Learning For Improving Self-Supervised Learningcited by 4
  10. 2023CryoGEM: Physics-Informed Generative Cryo-Electron Microscopycited by 4
  11. 2023Patch-wise Graph Contrastive Learning for Image Translationcited by 4
  12. 2024SCONE: A Novel Stochastic Sampling to Generate Contrastive Views and Hard Negative Samples for Recommendationcited by 4
  13. 2025USIGAN: Unbalanced Self-Information Feature Transport for Weakly Paired Image IHC Virtual Stainingcited by 3
  14. 2022Patch-wise Deep Metric Learning for Unsupervised Low-Dose CT Denoisingcited by 2
  15. 2023Unsupervised Synthetic Image Refinement via Contrastive Learning and Consistent Semantic-Structural Constraintscited by 2
  16. 2023AdaptSSR: Pre-training User Model with Augmentation-Adaptive Self-Supervised Rankingcited by 2
  17. 2024Contrastive Learning and Cycle Consistency-based Transductive Transfer Learning for Target Annotationcited by 2
  18. 2024CAS-GAN for Contrast-free Angiography Synthesiscited by 2
  19. 2024MGHF: Multi-Granular High-Frequency Perceptual Loss for Image Super-Resolutioncited by 2
  20. 2023Cross-modal Face- and Voice-style Transfercited by 1
  21. 2023Patch-Wise Self-Supervised Visual Representation Learning: A Fine-Grained Approachcited by 1
  22. 2023Leveraging Generative Language Models for Weakly Supervised Sentence Component Analysis in Video-Language Joint Learningcited by 1
  23. 2024An Analysis for Image-to-Image Translation and Style Transfercited by 1
  24. 2024Improving Object Detection via Local-global Contrastive Learningcited by 1
  25. 2024FashionR2R: Texture-preserving Rendered-to-Real Image Translation with Diffusion Modelscited by 1
  26. 2025CryoCCD: Conditional Cycle-consistent Diffusion with Biophysical Modeling for Cryo-EM Synthesiscited by 1
  27. 2026Image-to-Image Translation Framework Embedded with Rotation Symmetry Priorscited by 1
  28. 2023NPR: Nocturnal Place Recognition in Streetscited by 0
  29. 2023Disentangled Contrastive Image Translation for Nighttime Surveillancecited by 0
  30. 2023SemST: Semantically Consistent Multi-Scale Image Translation via Structure-Texture Alignmentcited by 0
  31. 2024NocPlace: Nocturnal Visual Place Recognition via Generative and Inherited Knowledge Transfercited by 0
  32. 2025Unpaired Object-Level SAR-to-Optical Image Translation for Aircraft with Keypoints-Guided Diffusion Modelscited by 0
  33. 2025NSYNC: Negative Synthetic Image Generation for Contrastive Training to Improve Stylized Text-To-Image Translationcited by 0