# HiCLRE: A Hierarchical Contrastive Learning Framework for Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.13352 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13352/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Feb 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [Understanding Contrastive Representation Learning through Alignment and Uniformity on the Hypersphere](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10242/) (2020)
- [EDA: Easy Data Augmentation Techniques for Boosting Performance on Text Classification Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.11196/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Contrastive Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00362/) (2020)
- [Matching the Blanks: Distributional Similarity for Relation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03158/) (2019)
- [ConSERT: A Contrastive Framework for Self-Supervised Sentence Representation Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11741/) (2021)
- [ERICA: Improving Entity and Relation Understanding for Pre-trained Language Models via Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15022/) (2020)
- [RESIDE: Improving Distantly-Supervised Neural Relation Extraction using Side Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04361/) (2018)
- [Orthogonal Relation Transforms with Graph Context Modeling for Knowledge Graph Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04910/) (2019)
- [Word-level Textual Adversarial Attacking as Combinatorial Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12196/) (2019)
- [Fine-tuning Pre-Trained Transformer Language Models to Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08646/) (2019)
- [Improving Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction using Word and Entity Based Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06987/) (2018)
- [Distant Supervision Relation Extraction with Intra-Bag and Inter-Bag Attentions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00143/) (2019)
- [DSGAN: Generative Adversarial Training for Distant Supervision Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09929/) (2018)
- [RikiNet: Reading Wikipedia Pages for Natural Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14560/) (2020)
- [Probing Linguistic Features of Sentence-Level Representations in Neural Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08134/) (2020)
- [CIL: Contrastive Instance Learning Framework for Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10855/) (2021)
- [Improving Distantly-Supervised Relation Extraction through BERT-based Label & Instance Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01156/) (2021)
- [SENT: Sentence-level Distant Relation Extraction via Negative Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11566/) (2021)
- [A Reinforced Generation of Adversarial Examples for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03677/) (2019)
- [Improving Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction with Neural Noise Converter and Conditional Optimal Selector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05616/) (2018)
- [Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction with Sentence Reconstruction and Knowledge Base Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08225/) (2021)
- [Empower Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction with Collaborative Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10835/) (2021)
- [Combining Distant and Direct Supervision for Neural Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.12956/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [HiCo: Hierarchical Contrastive Learning for Ultrasound Video Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04477/) (2022)
- [Adversarial Contrastive Learning for Evidence-aware Fake News Detection with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05498/) (2022)
- [HEX: Hierarchical Emergence Exploitation in Self-Supervised Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23200/) (2024)
- [HiT-JEPA: A Hierarchical Self-supervised Trajectory Embedding Framework for Similarity Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00028/) (2025)
- [CLEF HIPE-2026: Evaluating Accurate and Efficient Person-Place Relation Extraction from Multilingual Historical Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17663/) (2026)
- [Towards Zero-shot Relation Extraction in Web Mining: A Multimodal Approach with Relative XML Path](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13805/) (2023)
- [Sentence Bag Graph Formulation for Biomedical Distant Supervision Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18912/) (2023)
- [SCoRE: Streamlined Corpus-based Relation Extraction using Multi-Label Contrastive Learning and Bayesian kNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06895/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Distant supervision assumes that any sentence containing the same entity pairs reflects identical relationships. Previous works of distantly supervised relation extraction (DSRE) task generally focus on sentence-level or bag-level de-noising techniques independently, neglecting the explicit interaction with cross levels. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical contrastive learning Framework for Distantly Supervised relation extraction (HiCLRE) to reduce noisy sentences, which integrate the global structural information and local fine-grained interaction. Specifically, we propose a three-level hierarchical learning framework to interact with cross levels, generating the de-noising context-aware representations via adapting the existing multi-head self-attention, named Multi-Granularity Recontextualization. Meanwhile, pseudo positive samples are also provided in the specific level for contrastive learning via a dynamic gradient-based data augmentation strategy, named Dynamic Gradient Adversarial Perturbation. Experiments demonstrate that HiCLRE significantly outperforms strong baselines in various mainstream DSRE datasets.