# Contrastive Bayesian Analysis for Deep Metric Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.04402 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04402/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 55 of its 103 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [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)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [Deep Metric Learning via Lifted Structured Feature Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06452/) (2015)
- [Circle Loss: A Unified Perspective of Pair Similarity Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10857/) (2020)
- [Multi-Similarity Loss with General Pair Weighting for Deep Metric Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06627/) (2019)
- [A Metric Learning Reality Check](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08505/) (2020)
- [Sampling Matters in Deep Embedding Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.07567/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Embedding Learning via Invariant and Spreading Instance Feature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03436/) (2019)
- [No Fuss Distance Metric Learning using Proxies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07464/) (2017)
- [Proxy Anchor Loss for Deep Metric Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13911/) (2020)
- [SoftTriple Loss: Deep Metric Learning Without Triplet Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05235/) (2019)
- [Cross-Batch Memory for Embedding Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06798/) (2019)
- [Deep Metric Learning with Angular Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01682/) (2017)
- [ProxyNCA++: Revisiting and Revitalizing Proxy Neighborhood Component Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01113/) (2020)
- [A unifying mutual information view of metric learning: cross-entropy vs. pairwise losses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08983/) (2020)
- [Smart Mining for Deep Metric Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01285/) (2017)
- [Hard negative examples are hard, but useful](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12749/) (2020)
- [Ranked List Loss for Deep Metric Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03238/) (2019)
- [Improved Embeddings with Easy Positive Triplet Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.04370/) (2019)
- [Attention-based Ensemble for Deep Metric Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00382/) (2018)
- [Hardness-Aware Deep Metric Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.05503/) (2019)
- [Learning Deep Embeddings with Histogram Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.00822/) (2016)
- [Hard-Aware Deeply Cascaded Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05720/) (2016)

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

- [Threshold-Consistent Margin Loss for Open-World Deep Metric Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04047/) (2023)
- [HPCR: Holistic Proxy-based Contrastive Replay for Online Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15038/) (2023)
- [Language-driven Fine-grained Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06255/) (2025)
- [Object Retrieval for Visual Question Answering with Outside Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10798/) (2024)
- [Anti-Collapse Loss for Deep Metric Learning Based on Coding Rate Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03106/) (2024)
- [Realigned Softmax Warping for Deep Metric Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15656/) (2024)
- [Adversarial Reconstruction Feedback for Robust Fine-grained Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21742/) (2025)
- [Learning to Align Generative Appearance Priors for Fine-grained Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09859/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent methods for deep metric learning have been focusing on designing different contrastive loss functions between positive and negative pairs of samples so that the learned feature embedding is able to pull positive samples of the same class closer and push negative samples from different classes away from each other. In this work, we recognize that there is a significant semantic gap between features at the intermediate feature layer and class labels at the final output layer. To bridge this gap, we develop a contrastive Bayesian analysis to characterize and model the posterior probabilities of image labels conditioned by their features similarity in a contrastive learning setting. This contrastive Bayesian analysis leads to a new loss function for deep metric learning. To improve the generalization capability of the proposed method onto new classes, we further extend the contrastive Bayesian loss with a metric variance constraint. Our experimental results and ablation studies demonstrate that the proposed contrastive Bayesian metric learning method significantly improves the performance of deep metric learning in both supervised and pseudo-supervised scenarios, outperforming existing methods by a large margin.