# Weakly Supervised Contrastive Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.04770 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04770/

## Key facts

- Cited by 81 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [Understanding Contrastive Representation Learning through Alignment and Uniformity on the Hypersphere](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10242/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Representations by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09246/) (2016)
- [Big Self-Supervised Models are Strong Semi-Supervised Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10029/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Multiview Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05849/) (2019)
- [Learning deep representations by mutual information estimation and maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06670/) (2018)
- [Colorful Image Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08511/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning by Context Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05192/) (2015)
- [Unsupervised Data Augmentation for Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12848/) (2019)
- [Deep Clustering for Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05520/) (2018)
- [Self-Supervised Learning of Pretext-Invariant Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01991/) (2019)
- [Prototypical Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04966/) (2020)
- [Large Batch Training of Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03888/) (2017)
- [A Theoretical Analysis of Contrastive Unsupervised Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09229/) (2019)
- [Self-labelling via simultaneous clustering and representation learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05371/) (2019)
- [Hard Negative Mixing for Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01028/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 81)

- [MedCLIP: Contrastive Learning from Unpaired Medical Images and Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10163/) (2022)
- [SimMatch: Semi-supervised Learning with Similarity Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06915/) (2022)
- [Dynamic Conceptional Contrastive Learning for Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17393/) (2023)
- [PromptCAL: Contrastive Affinity Learning via Auxiliary Prompts for Generalized Novel Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05590/) (2022)
- [Learning Representation for Clustering via Prototype Scattering and Positive Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11821/) (2021)
- [Green Hierarchical Vision Transformer for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13515/) (2022)
- [Learning Audio-Visual Source Localization via False Negative Aware Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11302/) (2023)
- [LightViT: Towards Light-Weight Convolution-Free Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05557/) (2022)
- [InfoNCE Loss Provably Learns Cluster-Preserving Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07920/) (2023)
- [OpenCon: Open-world Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02764/) (2022)
- [Learning Visual Representations via Language-Guided Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12248/) (2023)
- [Learning Where to Learn in Cross-View Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14898/) (2022)
- [S-CLIP: Semi-supervised Vision-Language Learning using Few Specialist Captions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14095/) (2023)
- [Multi-Label Guided Soft Contrastive Learning for Efficient Earth Observation Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20462/) (2024)
- [Multiple Instance Learning via Iterative Self-Paced Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09452/) (2022)
- [Learning to Align Sequential Actions in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09301/) (2021)
- [ProtoGCD: Unified and Unbiased Prototype Learning for Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03755/) (2025)
- [Similarity Contrastive Estimation for Self-Supervised Soft Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14585/) (2021)
- [Utilizing Expert Features for Contrastive Learning of Time-Series Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11517/) (2022)
- [Shrinking Class Space for Enhanced Certainty in Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06777/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Object Localization in the Era of Self-Supervised ViTs: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12904/) (2023)
- [SeBot: Structural Entropy Guided Multi-View Contrastive Learning for Social Bot Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11225/) (2024)
- [OpenForest: A data catalogue for machine learning in forest monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00277/) (2023)
- [Cross-Modal and Uncertainty-Aware Agglomeration for Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16707/) (2025)
- [Weakly-supervised Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Object Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03376/) (2023)
- [SimMatchV2: Semi-Supervised Learning with Graph Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06692/) (2023)
- [Open-Vocabulary 3D Semantic Segmentation with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13642/) (2024)
- [DyRep: Bootstrapping Training with Dynamic Re-parameterization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12868/) (2022)
- [Integrating Prior Knowledge in Contrastive Learning with Kernel](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01646/) (2022)
- [Contextually Affinitive Neighborhood Refinery for Deep Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07806/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unsupervised visual representation learning has gained much attention from the computer vision community because of the recent achievement of contrastive learning. Most of the existing contrastive learning frameworks adopt the instance discrimination as the pretext task, which treating every single instance as a different class. However, such method will inevitably cause class collision problems, which hurts the quality of the learned representation. Motivated by this observation, we introduced a weakly supervised contrastive learning framework (WCL) to tackle this issue. Specifically, our proposed framework is based on two projection heads, one of which will perform the regular instance discrimination task. The other head will use a graph-based method to explore similar samples and generate a weak label, then perform a supervised contrastive learning task based on the weak label to pull the similar images closer. We further introduced a K-Nearest Neighbor based multi-crop strategy to expand the number of positive samples. Extensive experimental results demonstrate WCL improves the quality of self-supervised representations across different datasets. Notably, we get a new state-of-the-art result for semi-supervised learning. With only 1% and 10% labeled examples, WCL achieves 65% and 72% ImageNet Top-1 Accuracy using ResNet50, which is even higher than SimCLRv2 with ResNet101.