# Generalized Supervised Contrastive Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.00384 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00384/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jun 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [Improved Regularization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Cutout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04552/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning by Predicting Image Rotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.07728/) (2018)
- [MLP-Mixer: An all-MLP Architecture for Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01601/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Self-training with Noisy Student improves ImageNet classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04252/) (2019)
- [Contrastive Multiview Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05849/) (2019)
- [Colorful Image Colorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08511/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning by Context Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.05192/) (2015)
- [When Does Label Smoothing Help?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02629/) (2019)
- [What Makes for Good Views for Contrastive Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10243/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Representation Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10699/) (2019)
- [Data-Efficient Image Recognition with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09272/) (2019)
- [Deep Pyramidal Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02915/) (2016)
- [Representation Learning by Learning to Count](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.06734/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the recent promising results of contrastive learning in the self-supervised learning paradigm, supervised contrastive learning has successfully extended these contrastive approaches to supervised contexts, outperforming cross-entropy on various datasets. However, supervised contrastive learning inherently employs label information in a binary form--either positive or negative--using a one-hot target vector. This structure struggles to adapt to methods that exploit label information as a probability distribution, such as CutMix and knowledge distillation. In this paper, we introduce a generalized supervised contrastive loss, which measures cross-entropy between label similarity and latent similarity. This concept enhances the capabilities of supervised contrastive loss by fully utilizing the label distribution and enabling the adaptation of various existing techniques for training modern neural networks. Leveraging this generalized supervised contrastive loss, we construct a tailored framework: the Generalized Supervised Contrastive Learning (GenSCL). Compared to existing contrastive learning frameworks, GenSCL incorporates additional enhancements, including advanced image-based regularization techniques and an arbitrary teacher classifier. When applied to ResNet50 with the Momentum Contrast technique, GenSCL achieves a top-1 accuracy of 77.3% on ImageNet, a 4.1% relative improvement over traditional supervised contrastive learning. Moreover, our method establishes new state-of-the-art accuracies of 98.2% and 87.0% on CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 respectively when applied to ResNet50, marking the highest reported figures for this architecture.