# Masked Reconstruction Contrastive Learning with Information Bottleneck Principle

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.09013 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09013/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Nov 2022.

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

- [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)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [Barlow Twins: Self-Supervised Learning via Redundancy Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03230/) (2021)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [Accurate, Large Minibatch SGD: Training ImageNet in 1 Hour](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02677/) (2017)
- [Unified Perceptual Parsing for Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10221/) (2018)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [Semantic Understanding of Scenes through the ADE20K Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.05442/) (2016)
- [Deep Variational Information Bottleneck](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00410/) (2016)
- [iBOT: Image BERT Pre-Training with Online Tokenizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07832/) (2021)
- [What Makes for Good Views for Contrastive Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10243/) (2020)
- [Deep Learning and the Information Bottleneck Principle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02406/) (2015)
- [Learning Representations by Maximizing Mutual Information Across Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00910/) (2019)
- [Masked Feature Prediction for Self-Supervised Visual Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09133/) (2021)
- [Opening the Black Box of Deep Neural Networks via Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00810/) (2017)
- [Learning Deep Transformer Models for Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01787/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Know Your Self-supervised Learning: A Survey on Image-based Generative and Discriminative Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13689/) (2023)
- [MacDiff: Unified Skeleton Modeling with Masked Conditional Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10473/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Contrastive learning (CL) has shown great power in self-supervised learning due to its ability to capture insight correlations among large-scale data. Current CL models are biased to learn only the ability to discriminate positive and negative pairs due to the discriminative task setting. However, this bias would lead to ignoring its sufficiency for other downstream tasks, which we call the discriminative information overfitting problem. In this paper, we propose to tackle the above problems from the aspect of the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle, further pushing forward the frontier of CL. Specifically, we present a new perspective that CL is an instantiation of the IB principle, including information compression and expression. We theoretically analyze the optimal information situation and demonstrate that minimum sufficient augmentation and information-generalized representation are the optimal requirements for achieving maximum compression and generalizability to downstream tasks. Therefore, we propose the Masked Reconstruction Contrastive Learning~(MRCL) model to improve CL models. For implementation in practice, MRCL utilizes the masking operation for stronger augmentation, further eliminating redundant and noisy information. In order to alleviate the discriminative information overfitting problem effectively, we employ the reconstruction task to regularize the discriminative task. We conduct comprehensive experiments and show the superiority of the proposed model on multiple tasks, including image classification, semantic segmentation and objective detection.