# Identical and Fraternal Twins: Fine-Grained Semantic Contrastive Learning of Sentence Representations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.10932 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10932/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [SemEval-2017 Task 1: Semantic Textual Similarity - Multilingual and Cross-lingual Focused Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00055/) (2017)
- [What Makes for Good Views for Contrastive Learning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10243/) (2020)
- [Universal Sentence Encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11175/) (2018)
- [Supervised Learning of Universal Sentence Representations from Natural Language Inference Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02364/) (2017)
- [Skip-Thought Vectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06726/) (2015)
- [CLUE: A Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05986/) (2020)
- [ConSERT: A Contrastive Framework for Self-Supervised Sentence Representation Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11741/) (2021)
- [Whitening Sentence Representations for Better Semantics and Faster Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15316/) (2021)
- [CERT: Contrastive Self-supervised Learning for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12766/) (2020)
- [DiffCSE: Difference-based Contrastive Learning for Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10298/) (2022)
- [Convolutional Neural Network Architectures for Matching Natural Language Sentences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03244/) (2015)
- [Debiased Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Sentence Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00656/) (2022)
- [How Language-Neutral is Multilingual BERT?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03310/) (2019)
- [SNCSE: Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Sentence Embedding with Soft Negative Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05979/) (2022)
- [Exploring the Impact of Negative Samples of Contrastive Learning: A Case Study of Sentence Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13093/) (2022)
- [Virtual Augmentation Supported Contrastive Learning of Sentence Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08552/) (2021)
- [A Sentence is Worth 128 Pseudo Tokens: A Semantic-Aware Contrastive Learning Framework for Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05877/) (2022)

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

- [CLCE: An Approach to Refining Cross-Entropy and Contrastive Learning for Optimized Learning Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14551/) (2024)
- [Topic-DPR: Topic-based Prompts for Dense Passage Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06626/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The enhancement of unsupervised learning of sentence representations has been significantly achieved by the utility of contrastive learning. This approach clusters the augmented positive instance with the anchor instance to create a desired embedding space. However, relying solely on the contrastive objective can result in sub-optimal outcomes due to its inability to differentiate subtle semantic variations between positive pairs. Specifically, common data augmentation techniques frequently introduce semantic distortion, leading to a semantic margin between the positive pair. While the InfoNCE loss function overlooks the semantic margin and prioritizes similarity maximization between positive pairs during training, leading to the insensitive semantic comprehension ability of the trained model. In this paper, we introduce a novel Identical and Fraternal Twins of Contrastive Learning (named IFTCL) framework, capable of simultaneously adapting to various positive pairs generated by different augmentation techniques. We propose a textitTwins Loss to preserve the innate margin during training and promote the potential of data enhancement in order to overcome the sub-optimal issue. We also present proof-of-concept experiments combined with the contrastive objective to prove the validity of the proposed Twins Loss. Furthermore, we propose a hippocampus queue mechanism to restore and reuse the negative instances without additional calculation, which further enhances the efficiency and performance of the IFCL. We verify the IFCL framework on nine semantic textual similarity tasks with both English and Chinese datasets, and the experimental results show that IFCL outperforms state-of-the-art methods.